One of the most interesting things to me about Daniel Lindsay
and T.J. Martin’s Undefeated, the Oscar-winning
documentary about Bill Courtney, a white football coach of a team
of poor, inner-city black players from North Memphis, is that it
never mentions the irony of the name of Manassas High School, where
it is set. The school was founded, as we are told, in 1899 and was
therefore presumably named for what local veterans of the armies of
the defunct Confederacy regarded as victories for their side in two
battles of the Civil War — known to the Union side and to most
historians as First and Second Bull Run — at Manassas, Virginia,
outside Washington, D.C. This commemoration of the slave-states’
triumph lives on in spite of the school’s now being an urban sink
for the poor and largely socially dysfunctional descendants of the
slaves. But then if Mr. Courtney, who is the film’s star and main
character, had shown any awareness of this irony he would
presumably never have come to coach at Manassas High in the first
place.
Lucky for us that he did. Lucky, too, for the kids of the
Manassas High Tigers, whom he turned from a perpetual doormat into
a winning team by instilling into them some of the manly virtues
prized by and (in the view of many) discredited by the
honor-obsessed Southerners of old. The film-makers have given us
much to admire in their portrait of this coach and three of his
players, but they themselves deserve some credit, too, for bravely
insisting on the relevance of bravery — together with discipline,
resolution and the will to win — in the lives of kids whom the
dominant culture usually prefers to see as helpless victims of
their morally as well as materially impoverished environment. He
himself sets the example of sacrifice by taking time away from his
family and business for the often frustrating and thankless task of
coaching in the unpromising Manassas High environment, and in the
end he feels he has to give the latter up for the sake of the
former. But he also has reason to hope that the inspiration of that
example will live on.
Uplift in a documentary is different from uplift in a work
of fiction. A fictional movie about high school football that had
the same stuff about character and manhood that Undefeated
has would have an entirely different context, and one which,
because we have seen that kind of thing too often before, would
have looked corny at best and fake at worst. In the movies nowadays
we’re always watching ourselves watching, and when we see the
things that we’ve seen in the past we subject them to very strict
authenticity-test. But documentaries traditionally aspire to a
different kind of authenticity. They’re for puncturing, not
creating illusions — and just such illusions as courage,
discipline and the rest, where they are illusions. Where they are
real, documentaries would normally have no interest in them. It was
the insight of Messrs. Lindsay and Martin that putting appeals to
character in this unfamiliar context could pack a considerable
emotional wallop — at least when combined with an understated
racial and social setting in which such things are also
unfamiliar.
One problem with the film is its very tight focus on the
three of Coach Courtney’s players who were most successful, winning
as a result of their gridiron grit places in higher education that
conventionally equate to success in mature life. As a result, we
don’t really see the team as a team — even though their success is
largely a matter of these guys’ commitment to the team in the
coach’s eyes as well as their own. O.C. Brown, Chavis Daniels, and
Montrail “Money” Brown are all as attractive characters as the
Coach and are doubtless the best examples of his success at
Manassas High, but I found it rather annoying that the rest of the
team was reduced to peripheral status and non-speaking roles — not
just because we may suspect that the bit players might have had
another story to tell but also because, on the film’s and Coach
Courtney’s own showing, everything in it, including the success of
players’ Brown, Daniels and Brown, was dedicated to and a product
of the team’s success.
It may be that Messrs. Lindsay and Martin felt that
bringing in very much in the way of team spirit on top of the
individual virtues they are mostly focused on would have tipped
their film off its even keel and too far in the direction of the
sea of schmalz on which they have so far managed to sail without
getting wet. It may be they are right. But sometimes a moralizer
has to take the risk of such a ducking if he is to make his point.
That point, as I take it, is that the social pathologies which make
these kids the hard cases they are have something to do with
somebody’s not “manning up” as they are being taught to do. Coach
Bill is not a replacement for the father missing from all their
lives, but his fatherly presence does appear to have a lot to do
with their and their team’s success and gives a new meaning to the
“Southern paternalism” that at least
one critic finds lurking behind their
social deprivation. You can see the racial and political
sensitivities that the film-makers did not wish to disturb and
understand why they avoided them, but that avoidance gives the
movie a slightly incomplete look — as if the history associated
with the school’s name and a lot more history besides has had to be
put firmly out of our minds as the price of our warm
feelings.
