“UNDEFEATED” My rating: A (Opening May 25 at the Glewood at Red Bridge)
113 minutes | MPAA rating: PG
Already I can hear you groaning over the Internet.
“A sports movie? An inspirational sports movie? Doncha got something with car wrecks?”
Your loss. “Undefeated” (not the similarly entitled turkey about Sarah Palin) isn’t just a terrific documentary. Simply put, it’s one of the year’s best movies, a real-life “The Blind Side” times 20.
The subject of this devastatingly emotional experience is a middle-aged suburban father with a big gut and jowls. Bill Courtney is the football coach for Memphis’ Manassass High School. Not that he’s an educator by training. He runs a lumber business and volunteers to coach an inner city team that hasn’t won a playoff game in the school’s 110-year-history.
In the course of “Undefeated” Courtney coaches his demoralized and underprivileged players to a winning season. That would miracle enough.
But T.J. Martin and Daniel Lindsay’s film makes all too clear, Courtney’s most daunting task is to instill hope, sensitivity, discipline and dedication in young men who are circling the drain.
I have no idea where a white guy like Courtney got the notion that he could make a difference to an all-black team, and even less of an inkling of why he puts himself (and, as it turns out, his family) through the emotional wringer like the one depicted here.
All I can say is “Thank God for people like Bill Courtney.” The guy makes me proud to be a human being.
Martin and Lindsay spent nine months living among Courtney and his players, concentrating on several individuals and then winnowing that list down to just a handful whose tremendously dramatic stories provide liberating tears and cheers.
For instance, there’s O.C. Brown, who despite his intimidating 315 pounds moves like a bullet. But he’s challenged both academically and domestically, and spends part of the year living with Coach and his bunch, who are determined to help him get a college scholarship.
Bill Courtney
There’s Money, the team’s best all around best player, whose future is threatened by a crippling ACL injury. Without football the kid is adrift and on the verge of being lost…and not just to football.
And if you want drama, spend a bit of time with Chavis, a kid so angry and violent that he’ll pick fights with his fellow players out of pure meanness. Your initial impression is that he’s a mad dog, too far gone to be rescued.
Not if Coach Courtney has his way.
If “Undefeated” had been fiction, we’d be hooting it off the screen for its dramatic improbabilities.
But it’s the truth. And so we laugh and bawl feel a bit better about the world.
| Robert W. Butler
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