Remember the Titans (2000)
The title of Boaz Yakin's film surfaces when one of the coaches tells his team to play hard, to make the other team never forget the night they scrapped with the Titans from T.C. Williams High School from Alexandria, Virginia. It's an inspiring moment, as the Titans indeed come back and teach their opponents many lessons in the science of the gridiron. It's not a very original moment, however.
The premise of the piece is a promising and even an important one. We watch another episode in the long story of the integration of American schools. Seventeen years have passed since Brown vs. Board of Education – it's 1971 – and forced busing has a lot of parents (and in imitation of this prejudice) children outraged. The film does not go into specifics; for example, we never discover that it was three schools (one with a largely white enrollment, two with largely African American enrollments) that merged. But backstories stay undeveloped, and we quickly pick up on the tension caused by changes on the coaching staff.
Herman Boone (Denzel Washington) has come from North Carolina, and is installed as head coach. Ousted from his position, Coach Yoast (Will Patton) says he'll move on, but changes his mind when his white players threaten to sit out the season. It's a political move, we find out, and the school board apparently intends to reinstall Yoast as chief if Boone loses even one game. So one conflict is established – the one among the coaches and their assistants. (Let me inject here that I've taught high school myself for a number of years, and have never seen a team with only three assistant coaches: Boone and Yoast each have only one disciple.)
The major problems come from the racial tension at football camp. Some of the best scenes hinge on Coach Boone's determination to break the barriers of hate separating these youths. Outstanding in their performances are Wood Harris playing Julius, and Ryan Hurst playing Bertier, the All-American linebacker. We know they are traveling a course that will intersect in friendship, but still we eat up the fights they cause and cause to stop. Though both actors look much too old for high schoolers, they create a level of believability, and they make us want to watch them in other vehicles.
It takes a good 45 minutes before we see any action in the regular season football games. But by this time, the characters are well developed, the conflicts clear. Another item that diverges from the source story is that the Titans pushed many of their foes right off the field, blew them off the scoreboard. Here most of the games are portrayed as close contests. I was glad that the plot does not rely too heavily on game action; there's enough of it here, but we still see the players and coaches plenty off the field. And they are fighting the battles of prejudice wherever they go: the players often trying to mediate in school fights, the coaches coping with political hijinks and boardroom betrayals.
Denzel Washington is one of the most reliable actors in American movies. What he's in will probably succeed, as he does not have much trouble taking on the focus of the narrative. Though Washington still does not command the money taken home by white superstars, he is able to match the intensity and presence of anyone opposite him. I was also glad to see Will Patton depicting such a multi-faceted character. His Yoast actually grows, and we view him as a caring family man as well as conflicted coach.
Events late in the film tend to distract us from the story of race and football. The end does not dive into downright sappiness, but the story veers a little and staggers on a bit too long. The music was very engaging – the soundtrack will doubtless play in the living rooms of thousands of fans of oldies. And about an hour into the playing time, the editing cuts loose into a cool triptych of montages.
On the whole, REMEMBER THE TITANS pleases fans of football and racial justice alike, though it fails to use fresh devices to put even more points up on the board.
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