We Are Marshall is like every other underdog sports movie you’ve ever seen-with a twist. Instead of a team overcoming a bad record, racism, or an overwhelming opponent, the 1971 Marshall University Thundering Herd is overcoming the complete and total loss of the 75-member 1970 football team and its coaching staff to a disastrous plane crash.
Devastated by the loss, the town of Huntington, West Virginia and acting Marshall University president Donald Dedmon (David Strathairn) decide to suspend the upcoming season. But a student movement, led by one of the few surviving team members not on the plane, Nate Ruffin (Anthony Mackie) convinces the school administration that in order for healing to take place, the team must be rebuilt.
Following a protracted search of possible coaches, none of whom are interested in the impossible job, the school settles on Jack Lengyel (Matthew McConaughey) to lead the new team. Beginning with only two players and an assistant coach, Red Dawson (Lost’s Matthew Fox) plagued with survivor’s guilt, Lengyel pieces together a team strong in spirit but woefully weak in experience. However, no matter how hard whipping the boys into shape may be, coach Lengyel’s most difficult task will be winning the hearts and minds of the skeptical townsfolk. Is fielding a team with little to no chance of victory honoring the dead or mocking them?
It’s amazing how the reprehensible fashions and hairstyles of the ’70s are pervasive enough even to obliterate nearly all of the rugged handsomeness of lead McConaughey. The fact that McConaughey decides to campily channel Jon Stewart channeling George W. Bush for his impersonation of Lengyel doesn’t help either. Still, interestingly enough, this is not McConaughey’s film. The emotional resonance belongs to Fox as a shattered coach who feels both responsible for the crash and guilty that he decided to drive from the fateful away game, instead of fly with the rest. His are some of the film’s best scenes.
They are, however, not the only emotional moments. The scenes in which Nate stirs the student body to action are rousing, as are the latter scenes in which he fights through his injuries-both physical and emotional. However, the film misses out on any real character development, assuming our hearts will go where the characters go merely because we are engaged through their tragic circumstances. This only takes us so far.
We Are Marshall is unusual given the fact that the big climax is only the second game of the football season and we are later told that Marshall would go on to win only one more game that year and have the worse record of any school in the decade. But this is not a story of success in the arena of football, but in the arena of life. This is a phoenix’s story of rising from the ashes to life and fight again another day, and the acknowledgment that such Herculean efforts don’t occur overnight.
© Copyright 2006 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.
