McFarland, USA is the type of movie where you have to watch dozens of non-singers perform the entirety of the national anthem, and you're made to feel guilty if you're annoyed by it. It's also a movie that asks you to plain-face accept that Mexican immigrants are built for long-distance running because "they carbo-load on rice and beans." So let's be clear: the only reason I watched McFarland is that every year, I try to see all of the well-reviewed films directed by women. I did not come to this one with a lot of enthusiasm or a lot of love.
I was interested, though, to see the director of Whale Rider and North Country take on a very male-centric sports drama peripherally (too peripherally) about Mexican immigrants. Not only do studios rarely choose female directors for predominantly male genres, but presumably there aren't a lot of Mexicans in Director Niki Caro's homeland of New Zealand; she's certainly not the most-savvy option as it relates to Anglo-Mexican relations in the US.
But upon viewing, the choice made sense. Caro does have a knack for taking tired narratives and lazy tropes, recontextualizing them, and making them powerful again. And then there's her perspective as a meta-outsider. She's experienced in telling stories about communities she isn't part of, as she did with the Maori in Whale Rider. Here we see her, an outsider to the United States and to Mexican-Americans, telling a story that's about an outsider to a Mexican-American community, with tremendous intimacy...and an empathy that can grow patronizing. I suppose if we can suspend our anger about Disney's decision to a) not really make the story about the immigrant teens who actually won California's first cross-country title and b) not hire a Mexican director, then Caro is the closest thing to the right fit.
She's certainly a worthy filmmaker, especially when it comes to crafting powerful visual narrative. She sees human drama and human beauty in small, natural moments, and she knows you can take in a complete, lush story using only your eyes. As such, the movie's most successful narrative scenes are the cross-country team's wordless runs; here we see a 15-year-struggle for self-worth and a hundreds year struggle for racial and economic inequality play out in these boys without any dialogue and minimal preceding exposition. Even in that lingering moment in the second act, when they see and touch the ocean for the first time in their lives, the audience knows through Caro's visual direction that suddenly a whole knew way of being has become possible for these kids.
For someone who is looking for a familiar sports drama, especially of the race-relations variety, I'd say the film works. You'll cry when you're told to cry. You'll be charmed when you're told to be charmed. You'll decide that the fact you always root for the underdog means you're not a racist, and the films seems pretty content to let you off the hook with that. But as someone who thinks too much, I had a lot of questions and a lot of problems.
Overdone and problematic as it is, one expects to see growth in Kevin Costner's Coach White during the film as it relates to racism. We assume he'll start off apprehensive, insensitive, a tinge cagey and offensive, and by the end of the movie make some overreaching comment about how we're all the same. That's there, and fine, I'll live with it. But what about this problematic narrative where Coach White is an abusive asshole with anger issues and he's grateful he finally found a population who has suffered enough abuse to take it? White has been fired from several jobs before being "relegated" to McFarland because he gets in fights with parents and teachers, he intimidates his players, and at the beginning of the film, he throws a cleat at an insolent student's face and cuts him. Not only is the audience pushed to laugh it off and side with White, but the film becomes a forum for him to celebrate having found a community that has faced so much adversity that they aren't shaken when he can't slow down or stop his anger or his demands.
And for a movie that has decided Kevin Costner, not his team, is the protagonist, he consistently remains an unlikeable bully throughout the film. He's largely inattentive to his family and indifferent about how inattentive he is. He's invested in success but not very invested in his students and teammates. He "adorably" builds his track team by blackmailing, manipulating, and stalking all of his students. And in what is perhaps intended to be one of his redeeming moments, we're supposed to decide that Kevin Costner is an alright guy because he insists a student with a concussion shouldn't keeping playing football. Not only is that a very low threshold for human decency, but he doesn't even send the concussed student to the doctor-- he just tells him to go sit down.
And when it comes to those issues of race and ethnicity, the film's politics remain uneven, but perhaps still less problematic than white teacher savior narratives like Freedom Writers and Dangerous Minds. Caro does generally do a respectable job with a difficult balancing act; she needs to show tremendous respect for the community and the value of the work that they do--all community members in McFarland are day laborers--while also showing the community as a place a person would want out of, would want to "graduate" from. Those dual moments of respect but limitation are powerful. In one scene, Costner has the students practicing hills by running them up and down covered mounds of almonds that the Mexican laborers have farmed. One of his students beautifully flips out on Costner, not only shaken by how insulting and thoughtless the exercise was, but aware of the poetry in it, that the students are paving their way to a better life by stomping all over the work of their parents.
But there are many more problematic, less sensitive moments. The high school English teacher, after delivering an unprompted tirade on the school-to-prison pipeline in the community, praises Coach White for the change he has made in his students. Her evidence is a poem one of his athletes has written in which he highlights how, when running, he is no longer a "stupid Mexican" or a "dirty immigrant" but free like a bird. "Good job, Coach!" she tells him, when the moment isn't--or at least isn't exclusively--laudatory. Anyone who has ever been part of a stigmatized and oppressed population can tell you about the self-hatred that comes with it. I know it's something I've experienced as a gay man, and many friends of color have shared stories of more dramatic struggles to love their own identities and find beauty in their own skin in such a racist world. It's beautiful to know Coach White's students have discovered new opportunities for themselves and can imagine being a person they could love, but why share a poem that suggests this self-love comes at the expensive of renouncing or hating your heritage? I don't take issue with a film that identifies the struggle for self-love in the colonized mind, but I do take issue with a film that oversimplifies it and demands we celebrate it.
And then there's Coach White's final pep talk. In an effort to affirm his athletes, convince them that they're strong, disciplined, hard-working, and worthy, he goes a step too far. He literally says that Mexicans are "superhuman" and possess a strength and a work ethic that white people don't, and that they accomplish things as day laborers that no gringo could. And while it's important to celebrate the athletes and their parents' sacrifice and work, it starts playing into longstanding "noble savage" narratives when you use the words Costner chooses. It's as if he suggests that Mexicans are uniquely suited for day labor, that it's beyond anything white people are suited for, and in doing so, affirms the way the US labor force is structured with white people open to endless opportunity and "superhuman" Mexicans happily working away in the grape vineyards of California because it's the most appropriate work for them.
There were moments that I loved, many of them in fact. As someone who cries at any underdog story, I cried four-fold at this one. Not only were the running scenes moving, but there's a gorgeous equity in cross-country running because the person on your team who finishes 5th is just as important as the person who finishes 1st; it allows for multiple underdogs, multiple heroes, and tremendous unity. And all of the student-athletes in the film are charming, charismatic, earnest, and easy to love. Particularly charming is Coach White's eldest daughter, Julie, played by Morgan Saylor with innocence, sincerity, curiosity, and kindergarten romance chemistry with star athlete Carlos Pratts. There were even brief shining moments of gratitude and empathy with Kevin Costner's racist, ready-to-Hulk-out Coach White that touched me. In one such moving scene, he affirms and verbally "celebrates" his daughter's womanhood with a humble, respect-filled toast; of course, it just so happens to be the scene where they've culturally-appropriated the quinceañera, directly preceding the scene where he alienates himself from the entire community by deciding his daughter's skinned knee is a greater atrocity than the near-fatal stabbing of neighborhood Mexican teenage boys. Such is the world of McFarland, USA.
And here's your hot dude of the film:
Carlos Pratts: Moody, Adorable, Approachable.
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