It may sound odd, but the thing that bothered me most about
We Are Marshall is the name of the director. Billed only
as McG, the gentleman shuns the name given him at birth by his
parents, which was Joseph McGinty Nichol, McGinty being his
mother’s maiden name. It’s the name of an honest worker who, glad
to be known as a member of his own family, is likely to take pride
in his workmanship as well. McG, by contrast, is the name of
someone desperate to stake his claim to celebrity — and who, in
doing so, sees himself and wants us to see him as sui
generis, all on his own without forebears or descendants. He’s
nothing but a great big shining star, all alone in the firmament
and instantly recognizable (he hopes) by those three letters — one
fewer even than Cher. Does this matter? I suppose not if this were
Charlie’s Angels or Charlie’s Angels: Full
Throttle, which are his previous feature credits, or the music
videos he mainly did before that. But We Are Marshall is a
movie about community, family, memory — the very things that his
made-up name denies. How seriously, therefore, can we take what he
has to say about them?
The question is particularly important because the story he is
telling is a true one. On November 14th, 1970, while returning from
a game against East Carolina, almost the entire football team of
Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia, together with
most of its coaching staff and a number of boosters and supporters,
was killed in a plane crash. The rest of the season was of course
canceled, and it looked as if football at Marshall was finished, at
least for some years to come. But a group of students led by Nate
Ruffin (Anthony Mackie), a team co-captain who had been left behind
on account of an injury, organized to demand that the university’s
president, Donald Dedmon (David Strathairn), take steps to field a
team the very next year.
According to the movie, anyway, on the other side was the
supposedly “composite” character of Paul Griffen (Ian McShane), a
local industrialist supposed to have been both a member of the
university’s board of governors and father of the golden-boy
quarterback who had been killed. “It wouldn’t be a game anymore,
Don,” he says of the proposal to revive Marshall football. “It
would be a weekly reminder of what we have lost.” Don, as you might
have guessed, goes ahead anyway and engages Jack Lengyel (Matthew
McConaughey) as his new head coach. Jack, in turn, persuades the
one surviving coach of the old team, Red Dawson (Matthew Fox), to
come back for one year to help out, though his own fortuitous
escape from the disaster has so traumatized him that he is ready to
give up football completely — and he does so after his year as
Jack’s assistant.
Emotionally, you will see already where this is going. On the
one side, you have the continuing grief of Red Dawson, Paul Griffen
and others, always threatening to drag us down, and on the other
you have the gentle and humorous proddings and cajolings of the
determinedly amiable Jack Lengyel pointing us towards an uplifting
conclusion. In this respect, We Are Marshall is like every
other football movie which pits an underdog against opponents they
supposedly have no chance of defeating, but it’s none the worse for
that. In fact, it’s the least original parts of the movie that are
the most engaging and exciting and genuinely uplifting things about
it. As they say, the old stories are best.
But we also see in the film a point of intersection between two
contradictory American cultural tendencies: the athletic culture of
victory above all and the therapeutic culture that eschews
competition in favor of nurturing and self-esteem. Mr. McG seems
hardly to have noticed that there’s a conflict there. If grief and
pain can be healed, at least in some degree, by victory, where’s
the problem? Here it is. It’s a question of relative values. In the
too-brief snatch of film before the plane crash, we see the doomed
head coach saying to his players after their narrow loss to East
Carolina: “There’s only one thing people remember, and it ain’t how
we played the game. Winning is the only thing.”
This has become almost a cliche of American sports, and here is
a golden, unmissable opportunity for the film to do with it what
films ought to do with cliches, namely to explode them. If ever
there were an invitation to dramatic irony, here it is. And yet Mr
McG scarcely bothers to point it up. We can hardly avoid seeing
that, in the long term, victory and defeat are merely footnotes.
The one thing people remember is the sense of love and community
that binds them together and that is so tragically fractured by the
accident. But the film isn’t really very interested in this. If
pitting a team of underdog freshmen — allowed by special
dispensation of the NCAA — and walk-ons against a series of much
more experienced foes and hoping for victory is going through the
motions, the regular mentions of grief that form the backdrop to
that drama is going through the emotions.
The two come together in the big inspirational speech by Jack
Lengyel to the new Marshall team before the climactic game. He
begins by saying that, like “everyone in this business who’s worth
a darn,” he, too, believes in the old coach’s credo that “winning
is everything and nothing else matters.” But, he adds, the grief
they all feel sort of puts this on hold. “Some day we’ll wake up
and be like every other team and winning will be everything again.”
I don’t know about you, but I find this confusing. Is winning
everything or isn’t it? Mr. McG’s own hunger for celebrity suggests
that he, if not Jack Lengyel, would say that it is, if only he
thought he could speak freely. This to me smacks of the crassness
of a success ethos like that of Marshall alumnus Randy Moss, now
with the Oakland Raiders, who once said that the plane crash
“really wasn’t nothing big.” Marshall deserves better.
