Running hard and untrue

A scene from Disney's "McFarland, USA." Photo by Ron Phillips, ©Disney Enterprises, Inc.

I lament often about missed opportunities for movies with the dreaded “based on a true story” sticker slapped on them. Rarely does the cinematic version do justice to the real story, turning people into heroes or hideous men and women and reality into a cartoon.

So it is with Disney's “McFarland, USA,” a film rooted in recent running history that begins with a lie and ends with a truth uplifting enough to bring an audience to applause. That last bit is exactly what the filmmakers wanted, even if they took the least interesting route to get there.

“McFarland, USA” stars the moderately dependable Kevin Costner as Jim White, an out-of-luck teacher/football coach forced to uproot his family (Maria Bello and two blonde girls) to the small, migrant town of McFarland, Calif., for a teaching position. He's hired as an assistant for the school's team as well, but a spat with the head coach ends his tenure after one game.

Fortunately, the firing becomes a bit of kismet when Costner notices the students’ natural running talent and starts a cross country team. Building a team requires two things: Recruiting seven runners (Ramiro Rodriguez, Carlos Pratts, Johnny Ortiz, Rafael Martinez, Hector Duran, Sergio Avelar and Michael Aguero) to create a squad and learning about the sport of cross country team. A few mandatory trials, tribulations and shenanigans involving plucky underdogs and cultural assimilation ensue before the team qualifies for the state meet and has its sights set on a state title.

When I mentioned “McFarland, USA” begins with a lie, it wasn't a hyperbolic statement – the very first scene sets the film's actions seven years after White starts the cross country program in 1980 to make it appear as if all of the team's success occurred in just one season. Really, it took seven years to reach the apex of the sport, and even the big championship meet includes a few fibs (the place of McFarland's top runner, for example, is inflated). The team’s place is true enough though, give or take a dramatic flourish. 

Like this.

I'm usually more than fine with a few white lies in a fictional retelling (it's just a movie after all), but I take umbrage with the changes made here actually diminish a far more interesting story. As mentioned above, it took the real Jim White almost a decade to push the squad to a championship-caliber team — McFarland's squad won nine over 15 years across several divisions — and what he had to do to win those titles is inspirational. His teams succeeded despite challenges like drug use, jail time, pregnancies, field work, gang life, poor grades, and many, many other challenges that face a migrant farming community like McFarland.

The Disney-fied story of White's career elides over much of that (aside from manual labor) and produces a sanitized version of what should be a messy story that blends failure and hope. Even director Niki Caro can't help but make the dusty fields of a central California town appear cleaner than they are, reducing a town that should be covered in farm dust and grime into a slightly sandy version of Main Street, USA.

Like this, but with oranges.

Yet the clean version still kind of works. Caro and the slew of screenwriters (this one has four listed on IMDB) follow the Disney biopic script without deviation, but they do so with ease and a terrific flow to make two-plus hours fly by without pain. The running sequences are particularly well shot and capture the majesty and pain the sport induces.

Really, though, the key to whatever success “McFarland, USA” has is an absence of cynicism and the abundance of sweetness the filmmakers bring to it. McFarland's community is painted as a place where the people do their best to get by and place a cornucopia of food on the table for every meal, and the community support is vibrant and vital.

The cinematic McFarland is a warm place, littered with actors who can bring that sweetness right out; even the crusty Costner (about two decades too old for his part) loosens up a bit and appears to have a little fun. (Bello is, again, rendered helpless in a terribly underwritten role. Somebody please give her a better part than token housewife.)

All of the love the cast gives in “McFarland, USA” comes to fruition at the end, when Rodriguez's Danny Diaz comes out of nowhere to keep his team's championship hopes alive. That's the scene that spurs the audience's outburst, and the filmmakers earn that applause by treating the moment with triumph in lieu of treacle.

Review: Three out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG

Run time: 128 minutes

Genre: Drama

Ask Away

Target audience: Running fans and coaches in need of an inspirational flick to show their team before a game.

Take the whole family?: It might get a little boring for really little kids, but the content is mild enough and inoffensive.

Theater or Netflix?: Cool for a theater jaunt as long as it’s at a matinee price.

Best running film ever? Not quite, although it's definitely among the top films not including documentaries. Then again, the contenders for that title are minimal at best; the choices include a series of Steve Prefontaine bio films and the vastly overrated “Chariots of Fire.”

Watch this as well?: “Without Limits” is your best bet for fiction films, while “Spirit of the Marathon” is a strong documentary about running. The best option is to hit the page and grab a copy of “The Perfect Mile,” which documents the chase to break the four-minute mile in the 1950s and offers a brief introduction to the incomparable Emil Zatopek. 

AKA the Locomotive and embodiment of awesome.