E Pluribus Unum
FILM: Remember the Titans
DIRECTOR: Boaz Yakin
STARRING: Denzel Washington, Will Patton
GRADE: B-
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T.C. WILLIAMS HIGH SCHOOL FOOTBALL COACH HERMAN BOONE (DENZEL WASHINGTON,
RIGHT) TRIES TO LEAD AN INTEGRATED TEAM TO VICTORY IN 1971 IN THE FACT-BASED
REMEMBER THE TITANS.
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In the best moment of Boaz Yakin's Remember the Titans, an early-1970s
football coach, Herman Boone (Denzel Washington), talks with a civil rights
leader about a decision he must shortly make. A successful African American
coach from North Carolina, with two high school state championships on his
resume, Boone had been hired as head coach of the all-black high school in
Alexandria, Virginia. Before he can supervise his first scrimmage,
however, he gets caught up in a court-ordered integration crisis. Against
its own wishes, the local school board is forced to merge the black school with
all-white T.C. Williams High. Boone assumes that he will now serve as an
assistant coach to Bill Yoast (Will Patton), Williams' highly successful
mentor, a state high school football hall-of-fame candidate who has led the
Williams Titans to five state titles.
In an act of cynical tokenism, however, the school board names
Boone to lead the Titans, hoping that the white players will boycott the team
in response, that Boone therefore will fail and that through his failure,
racial integration as a public policy can be stymied.
Boone is the farthest thing from a shrinking violet. He is a proud
man of fierce disposition. At the same time he's a fair man, and first and
foremost he's a football coach. He's hardly afraid of the challenge before
him. But he doesn't want to take from Yoast a job that Yoast has done well and
deserves to keep. Thus he contemplates turning the assignment down and looking
elsewhere for work. He ultimately doesn't, however, because the civil rights
leader convinces him that the issues at stake are far greater than justice
for Bill Yoast, that the progress of an entire oppressed race depends at
least in some small part on a black man's exercising the kind of leadership
opportunity Boone has been offered, whatever the reason.
Remember the Titans doesn't linger nearly long enough on the
dilemma Boone faces at the outset of his career at T.C. Williams. But at
least, in passing, the film does manage to capture the thorny personal
difficulties faced by those who would dare to change society. Martin Luther
King envisioned a life for himself as a college professor, scholar and
author. History made other demands. And a significant part of King's greatness
lies in the fact that he put himself second to the requirements of a
people in need of eloquent leadership.
On a much smaller scale, of course, Herman Boone is asked to make
a comparable sacrifice, to be as the civil rights leader terms it, "a race
man," when he'd prefer just to be a football coach. I wish that this movie
had focused on this specific dilemma, for had it done so, it would have been
a much better and much more important film than it is.
Written by Gregory Allen Howard and based on a true story,
Remember the Titans chronicles the turbulent 1971 football season at
T.C. Williams High. Boone accepts the head-coaching position, and begins the
daunting task of trying to make one team out of two sets of kids who don't know
each other and aren't disposed to like each other. At first, the white players
do indeed threaten to boycott, but they eventually join the squad when Bill
Yoast agrees to coach the defense. For a moment, it seems people think the
Titans will be all black on offense and all white on defense.
Boone squelches that idiotic idea immediately, and then moves to
integrate his team as effectively as one might want to see society itself
integrated, to emphasize ability and merit over skin color. At preseason camp,
he forces black and white to room together. He demands that each player
interview teammates of other races so that they can come to know each other on
a personal level. And then, in the film's corniest, least successful, most
cloying passage (even if it happened!), music swirling to alert us to the
proper emotional pitch, Coach Boone takes his team to the Gettysburg
battlefield and delivers a speech about fighting ancient wars or joining
together to move to a new and better place.
The abiding problem of Remember the Titans first manifests
itself in the Gettysburg scene. The players respond as Boone hopes. But the
movie can't end because the season hasn't even begun. And so the film's fitful
narrative delivers a machine-gun series of additional crises. A star white
player (Ryan Hurst) and a star black player (Wood Harris) don't like each
other, partially because of race, partially because of ego. But they become
best friends and enforcers of a racial cease fire that seems to undercut
earlier scenes that suggest the players have put race behind them.
The white player's girlfriend (Kate Bosworth) dumps him because of
his cross-racial friendships. But eventually, the girlfriend comes to the see
the error of her ways. This happens off screen, so we don't know what causes
her change of heart. Racist school board officials plot to fire Boone if he
loses even a single game, surely a lunatic conspiracy, but one the film asks us
to take seriously. A recalcitrant white offensive linesman refuses to block
for a gifted black running back. Outrageously, the film fails to address
why, then, Boone lets him play so much as one down, much less start deep into
the season. Boone and Yoast have widely divergent coaching styles, each with
its strengths and weaknesses. They have to learn to rely on each other. The
film is so mechanistic in its black-and-white give and take that at a
critical juncture, Yoast has to accept some of Boone's ideas about defense, and
Boone has to let Yoast suggest some offensive strategy.
Then in the playoffs, racist white referees try to steal a Titan
victory in a rainstorm of yellow penalty flags. Such things have happened,
of course. Basketball refs gave the Russians three different tries at a last
shot< so they could wrench the gold medal away from the Americans at the 1972
Olympics. Throughout the Cold War, Eastern- bloc judges consistently and
ruthlessly gave higher gymnastics, figure skating and diving scores to
athletes from communist countries. So perhaps the real T.C. Williams Titans did
have to overcome biased officiating. But the staging here is entirely
unconvincing. And the manner in which the officials are ultimately
forced to relent is nothing short of ludicrous.
Writer Howard says that he was motivated to write the screenplay
for Remember the Titans when he moved to Alexandria in the mid-1990s and
found the community a model of racial harmony. Eventually, he concluded that
the success of a high school football team three decades earlier was a central
reason why. In short, Howard seems to have had the best of motives for
developing this project, and despite his script's considerable flaws, the film
deserves approbation for its fundamental themes.
I can't help but wonder, though, how Howard's initial script
changed once it was bought by Jerry Bruckheimer, producer of such ham-handed
fare as Gone in 60 Seconds and Con Air. From Flashdance to
Top Gun to The Rock, Bruckheimer is
a filmmaker who emphasizes
glitz over substance, flash over cohesion and bottom line over all. Whatever
Howard's original vision, in Bruckheimer's producing hands Remember the
Titans is finally just a traditional sports film headed for the big
championship game. That formula can be made to work as it does in the original
Rocky and in Hoosiers and in Breaking Away. But it
works in those films because we have such deep investments in the
characters. In the final analysis, Remember the Titans spends too
much time on the field and too little time on the heart.
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