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.

Who needs chemistry, anyway?

Dakota Johnson and Jamie Dornan in a scene from "Fifty Shades of Grey." © 2015 Universal Studios and Focus Features.

One of my goals for the 2015 is to be a little kinder to some of the films I review. I already broke that promise to myself in the “The Boy Next Door” writeup, so I'm going to try again before the impending “Fifty Shades of Grey” destruction by saying Dakota Johnson does a very nice job as Anastasia Steele. She's chipper, perky and has a sense of humor in an otherwise dour movie, and she'd receive one of the “Good Job!” stickers I keep on my desk. Well done, Dakota!

Now that the lone positive is out of the way, let's dive right into the interminable pool of swamp muck that is “Fifty Shades of Grey.” It's a rather unsubtle film that takes itself far, far, far, far, far too seriously given the source material is a book based on “Twilight” fan fiction (author E.L. James wrote it under the pseudonym Snowqueens Icedragon; I have nothing to add to that) featuring the apparently unspeakable sexual activity known as BDSM. More on that in a bit though.

For people like me who found themselves impervious to Snowqueens Icedragon's siren call, “Fifty Shades of Grey's” stars the unexceptionally pretty Jamie Dornan as Christian Grey, a 27-year-old billionaire entrepreneur who sets his eyes on senior college student Anastasia Steele (Johnson). They flirt stiffly and disturbingly (Grey, like character inspirer Edward Cullen, has a habit of following his beloved around), dithering on and on about their respect feelings for each other. Dornan keeps acting creepy and stalker-ish, telling Johnson “I have to let you go,” and “You're here because I'm incapable of leaving you alone,” amid tidbits about how she wouldn't be able to walk for a week after they had sex.

It takes forever to get to the first direct mention of Dornan's proclivity for BDSM, and he spends a good chunk of the film convincing Johnson to sign an agreement to become his submissive. The contract is pretty detailed and covers everything from safety words to the tools used in the playroom (Dornan's term for his room). The dithering continues when Johnson can't quite commit herself to the arrangement before Dornan guides her into a few sessions, and they spend the rest of the film dating, brooding, engaging in sexual acts and getting into rather boring shenanigans that leaves the audience unsatisfied in many ways.

A few other characters pop in and out of the film — parents, friends, step parents, well wishers, a driver — but none of them matter when compared to the central couple, and any value derived from “Fifty Shades of Grey” depends on the lead’s connection. Unfortunately, the proverbial chemistry between Johnson — who, again, is quite good in a ridiculously thankless role — and the sack of handsome that is Dornan doesn't exist. Passionless is a kind way of describing their relationship; even the scenes when the two are wooing each other provides no reason hint of any emotional or sexual attraction. 

I'm not sure if the fault for that lack of desire rests on the actors' shoulders — they don't appear to like each other all that much in real life — or from some combination of James' original content and the adaptation by screenwriter Kelly Marcel (who wrote the mawkish “Saving Mr. Banks”). Logically it's going to be a blend of both, although it's worth pointing out how wildly the characters' moods, motivations and actions oscillate and how dire much of the dialogue is. I wish I could reprint the apex of awful dialogue, but it involves the film's title and a bit of profanity capped by a ludicrous line reading by Dornan. 

Not quite this ridiculous, but the same ballpark.

Underlying the problems contained within “Fifty Shades of Grey” two hours of stupid awfulness is the treatment of BDSM. This might fall back on James again (although Marcel and director Sam Taylor-Johnson double down on it), but the material treats the sexual activity as a shameful act too scary to talk about. That treatment of it might apply if this were, say, 1992 instead of 2015, where all it takes is a quick Google search to read about it without getting into the graphic nitty gritty. In other words, it's not that big of a deal, and a pretty minor sexual quirk in comparison to all the other crazy things on the Internet.

“Fifty Shades of Grey” though treats it like a grand societal taboo, even though way the BDSM acts are portrayed in the film are more akin to the work of Bettie Page than anything with a real bite to it. The filmmakers seem to titter about the concept as if they were 5 year olds hearing the word “butt” for the first time; it's kind of cute, but it really takes any sense of danger out of it.

Review : One and a half out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: R

Run time: 125 minutes

Genre: Drama

Ask Away

Target audience: Moms.

Take the whole family?: Yeah … no.

Theater or Netflix?: It’s not good enough to justify a theater trip, plus the people who want to watch it are better off doing so at home alongside a glass of wine.

A slow of a film is this? Holy hell is this film a slog, a really, really, really painfully long viewing process undone by seriousness and the constant waiting for something, anything of interest to happen. I felt like Milhouse when he watched the first Poochie episode, constantly wondering when the heck they're going to get to the dang fireworks factory.

Watch this instead? I could list a whole series of romantic films, from screwball comedies like “The Awful Truth” to children's fantasy films like “The Princess Bride,” that would induce more romantic feelings than this. But I know the appeal of “Fifty Shades of Grey” is its steaminess, so instead of dropping $10 on a theater trip, download the music video for Chris Isaak's “Wicked Game” – it sets the mood better in four minutes than “Fifty Shades” does in two hours.