McFarland USA - movie review

Film Thoughts

McFarland USA

A review by Dan McDonald

 

            I am not a real movie critic. I am simply someone who watches movies and tends to see something in movies that moves me. So I guess it should not surprise anyone that I also liked the movie “McFarland USA”.

            Was the movie a classic? No! It was based on a true story. Did the movie live up to its responsibility to tell the story the way things actually were? Let it suffice that the movie was a Disney Movie. Disney movies are to history what Hallmark movies are to romance. No matter the story or the history the plot lines all involve an initial crisis followed by a resolution that then threatens to unravel until at last it all ends in a happy ending. This is a Disney movie that tells a Disney story around a few facts of an event that actually happened. It is disappointing that when you compare the story told by Disney with the actual history of the McFarland cross country team, you are left in uncertainty concerning how much can be believed. Here is what Wikipedia reports on the historical accuracy of the story. But I believe the story that is told is a good one and that enough things about it must have been true enough that Coach Jim White proved to be able to motivate his runners from the strengths and resources that he discovered already existed within their community and backgrounds. He was not an outsider who merely brought his way of thinking into their lives and changed them as some form of white savior. He was a coach who had learned enough to connect with their way of seeing life to motivate them from within their own cultural background to excel in their endeavors. That is ultimately what the McFarland USA story is all about. It is of a coach who has learned enough of these students’ community life to be able to encourage them to build on their strengths while pursuing possibilities they might never have thought possible. He is able to connect with them in their culture to begin to hope for things which they may have regarded as outside of their reach before this coach had an impact on their lives.

The truth is Coach Jim White never got fired from a previous job before he started coaching at McFarland. The truth is he had been teaching at the school district for enough years that when he started teaching there it was a school of predominately White students. It had become a school of predominately Hispanic students. Coach White had taught in the school district as that process took place.

The movie showed Coach White’s life being touched by the friendliness of the Hispanic community. He became close enough to the Hispanic community that he saw how much hard work meant to the community and also how much community mattered to them. The Hispanic community shared labor, sorrow, joy, celebration, and hardship. I think this is something that people notice about Hispanic communities once you come into contact with them. It is quite believable that Coach White, who built one of the dominant cross country teams in California sports history learned to tap into these cultural resources when he motivated his young athletes to labor at their training so that they might excel at their sport.

It is in telling the story of how a coach learned to motivate his athletes from the strength of their own cultural resources that I believe this Disney movie for all of its faults tells an important story about the relationship between communities and the people who have positive influences on a community.

In the movie it becomes obvious that the Hispanic community’s commitment to being a community of neighbors who share the good and bad of life has an impact on Coach White and his family. Whether or not the events in the story line of the movie actually happened, it is believable to imagine a coach who knew his athletes to tap into the community qualities he recognized were important to his runners. It is believable to imagine a great coach building on the strengths he saw in the students he coached. He could use what he knew drove these athletes to encourage them to reach successes they had not yet begun to believe was a possibility for them.

We sometimes doubt the importance of the outsider who becomes a part of a community. The outsider coming into a community often has insights about a community’s strengths and weaknesses that are not necessarily so obvious to those living within a community from the time they were in a cradle. This is something many of us in various religious communities often see. There are cradle believers who live out a community life as if it were a natural way of living with little thought of any other ways of living; and then there are the converts who seem to notice something in their chosen community that was missing from their lives until they found it in their new community. It is very believable that Coach White saw the commitments possessed by the McFarland Hispanic community and realized these were elements that could be built upon when motivating these young athletes.

It is believable that he saw a reason to hope for great things when a community that had managed to build a life around shared difficulties may have come to imagine that these difficulties would always limit their futures. There is a scene in the movie where one of the young men asks what is the use of what they are doing for they are pickers (vegetable workers) for whom picking is the only life they will ever know. This is sometimes what happens in communities that are built around sharing hardships. They learn to cope while becoming jaded and unable to imagine a hope beyond the ability simply to cope. Coach White had a way of communicating to them that what they had experienced was their advantage in facing the struggles of training not only in their sport but in their lives.

Coach White definitely had an impact on the McFarland Hispanic community. He coached the team to win the state championship in cross country in 1987, and to more state championships in nine out of fourteen years. A majority of his students who ran on the first state championship team went to college and a majority of those who went to college graduated from college.

The most important lesson I learned from this movie was that a leader is never able to rise above his level of relationship with the community he is hoping to lead. If a leader is to lead a people across the wilderness to the finish line then he needs to know enough about what makes the people within a community tick to be able to speak to their hopes and dreams. He needs to convey to them the way to tap the resources available to them to find their pathway through the fears and obstacles they will meet in life. Such motivation may come from an outsider or from an insider, but it will almost never come from someone who hasn't learned the way those he leads find the motivation in their own lives to overcome all the obstacles. This is true whether one serves as a teacher, coach, boss, politician, or clergyman. Despite all of the film's weaknesses the movie spoke to me of the importance of a leader’s relationship to a community.