Wick's Review

Summary - Really Great 4.5

When the Game Stands Tall pegs several meters: football movies – coach movies – Bay Area movies. Arguably the greatest Football Movie ever, it is surely the first great Bay Area Football Movie. It profiles an all-time great football coach: Coach Bob Ladouceur of Concord’s legendary De La Salle Spartans.

Is it predictable? Ya think. The story is well known to anyone who followed Bay Area sports the past two decades. A small Catholic high school in Contra Costa county ran up the longest winning streak in sports history and sent scads of players through D1 and on to the NFL. Get this: They did it without scholarships.

The Coach is played by the guy who played Jesus in The Passion of the Christ, not entirely dissimilar roles. So yes it is predictable and earnestly non-ironic, with the key dialogue word-for-word speeches delivered by Coach “Lad” of De La Salle high school. Somewhat ascetic, the man is a laconic California inspiration.

The football action is first rate, perhaps the best ever. This includes lots of realistic sideline interactions: player-coach and coach-coach. Both De La Salle coaches and opposing coaches like the one from Long Beach High get spotlighted. This really gets inside the game. Coach Lad to his QB is especially good.

Artistic license has been taken: dates, characters, games. Who cares. The upshot remains unchanged, with details that are catnip for real football fans. The lens into one corner of the Bay Area is also compelling.

Got a football Jones this last week of NFL preseason? The De La Salle Spartans are a winning choice.

Acting - Great 4.0

Jim Caviezel – a past master at playing an ascetic leader of men – is a fitting choice to play legendary Coach Bob Ladouceur. Caviezel didn’t rest on his laurels, instead studying Coach Lad in person and from the documentary footage that shows over the closing credits of When the Game Stands Tall.

What’s amazing about Coach Lad is that he wasn’t a shouter. Hell, I don’t remember him shouting once. FOOTBALL COACH SHOUTING that is. He was also his team’s Bible class teacher, assigning them essays on Saint Matthew for instance. We’re talking Rare Bird. Caviezel is quietly equal to the task.

Michael Chiklis & Laura Dern play his real life partners: Asst. coach Terry Eidson & wife Bev Ladouceur.

• Chiklis is undersized to play the burly & bearded Coach Eidson, Coach Lad’s partner in building De La Salle from a school that had never fielded a winning football team to one that didn’t lose a game for twelve years. TWELVE YEARS they didn’t lose a game. No winning tradition to inherit, no scholarships and Coach Lad & Coach Eidson go on to win 151 consecutive games. That’s gotta be the greatest football coaching partnership in history, since that’s the longest winning streak in history. Anyway, I’m betting that Eidson’s pleased with how Chiklis played him.
• Dern is ideal as his strong and supportive wife, the woman who watched him reflexively throw away college coaching offers that included high six-figure salaries.

Spartans

• Alexander Ludwig as a fictional All America running back, with an odious practice dad played by Clancy Brown.
• Ser’Darius Blain as the real life Cam Colvin, who makes the movie’s most spectacular football play, tipping a deflection back inbounds to a streaking T.K. Kelly.
• Stephan James as real life Terrance “T.K.” Kelly, who had just completed a monster season for De La Salle and was off to play for Oregon when he was shot dead by another black teenager.
• Matthew Daddario as real life Danny Ladouceur, called Little Lad by the other players.
• Joe Massingill as a fictional hoss named Beaser.
• Jessie Usher plays fictional player Tayshon Lanear as a Terrell Owens-like egomaniac.
• Richard Kohnke as fictional quarterback Rick Salinas: 6’ 4" and can throw it a mile.
• Matthew Frias as a fictional scrub who ends up making a big play. Predictable, remember.
• Maurice Jones Drew cameos, a Spartan who graduated before the season the movie covers.

Shout out to the rest of the huge cast, including 60 Second Unit football players

Film - Really Great 4.5

Big biopics like When the Game Stands Tall are primarily judged on the momentousness of the lives and real events they purport to show. Coach Lad’s accomplishments at a small Catholic High School in Contra Costa County measure up.

The film gains power by spanning black & white America, several Spartan stars being black kids out of Richmond, others white suburban kids.

Random Notes

• One ding: The name is too long. Pity they couldn’t have called it Friday Night Lights: Bay Area.
• Nice to see the TriStar promo once again.

Edge - Risqué 1.8

The football violence is considerable, but the senseless black-on-black gun violence is heartrending.

Reality - Glib 1.3

When the Game Stands Tall stoops to conquer by mixing in fictional composites with real characters like Coach Lad, Coach Eidson, Cam Colvin & Terrance Kelly. What’s true, what’s Hollywood in ‘When the Game Stands Tall’ has details.

Trick plays aside, WGST is a font of sociological observation.

• Black crime is tragic if unremarkable, so long as a white person isn’t involved, or an Asian. That’s the main story behind Ferguson, the midwestern town whose travails transfix America these days. As to De La Salle’s murdered Terrance Kelly, the Chronicle wrote about his funeral and his nihilistic killer in Richmond’s Sorrow.
• You can see how Catholic schools do a better job educating tough kids. We should let them educate as many as they can handle.
• The Oregon Ducks sent a faux diploma to a top recruit’s Grandma with his name on it, knowing her dream was for her grandson to graduate from college. Yet it turns out that Oregon is a piker when it comes to recruiting compared to Miami.
• Stanford sent an offer letter to Coach Lad promising $350,000 a year and a house on the Farm. Wow.

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