Film Review: Glory Road
Glory Road is a sharp, crisply made, thoroughly modern product that spares no detail or expense
After finding that hand-drawn animation was long past its expiration date, and having stalwart affiliates Miramax and Pixar leave the halcyon comfort of its company's umbrella, you might say that Disney has had a rough go of things in recent memory. Silently, but very surely, though, the studio has begun to reinvent itself, becoming ground zero for a modestly profitable niche genre: The underdog sports movie. With Glory Road, another conventional but shamelessly entertaining, feel-good crowd pleaser, the studio has now hit on each major sport, following Remember the Titans, The Rookie, and Miracle. Deep within the dregs of moviedom that is the month of January (and not coincidentally released for the weekend prior to Martin Luther King Day), any ray of light is welcome, and Glory Road goes above and beyond, in spite of sticking very rigidly to their proven formula. Sticking to the conventional, in this case, is not a bad thing at all.
Glory Road's central facilitator is scrappy, hard-nosed coach Don Haskins (Josh Lucas), who in 1965 is plucked from a high school girls coaching job to helm the struggling Texas Western men's basketball program, primarily because he played in college for another legendary coach of the day, Henry Iba. In spite of a limited budget, a dearth of scholarships, and forced to live in a campus dorm with his wife (Emily Deschanel) and two young boys, Haskins embraces the opportunity to coach a Division I team, even as he is told that "football is king" in Texas. Taking note of his limited options, he decides to look off of the beaten path for players who he can mold into his defensive-minded, fundamental brand of basketball. This leads him and his staff of two to New York, Detroit and Gary, Indiana, among others, where after some badgering he's able to secure the services of seven largely unheralded black players, including the talented but raw and completely self-absorbed Bobby Joe Hill (Derek Luke, in a logical extension of his character from Friday Night Lights). As with Hill, all of Haskins' newcomers are highly skilled but entirely foreign to the concept of playing within a system, which turns the impetus back to the strong-willed coach and his ability to harness such unfocused potential.
After dealing with the inevitable friction between the largely white set of incumbent players and the new black recruits, Haskins is unrelenting in running them through the ringer at the smallest sign of dissention. Many practices are marked by innocuous drills, endless wind sprints and suicides (the end-to-end runs that are admittedly very brutal), and one player even threatens to leave before being persuaded back. After a fast start to their season, a stretch of seventeen wins in a row, Haskins' flagrant disregard for the traditionally-acknowledged racial boundaries within Texas Western's athletic program still raises the ire of the boosters, the white alumni who of their own inclination bankroll a great deal of the school's athletic activities (oh, where would college athletics be without boosters; just ask Notre Dame), therefore acting as the voice of Haskins' conscience whether he wants to hear it or not. Haskins remains staunch within his original plan, deflecting the pressure and keeping his players out of the line of fire. The season's first loss in a road game at Seattle sparks a heated exchange between the white players, who resent being pushed aside, and the black players, who scoff at the whites' notion that they've been made the minority. Other road trips are marred by the beating of one player in a diner restroom, and the vandalizing of players' hotel rooms. It turns out that Haskins' wife is making a concerted effort to maintain her husband's better interests, keeping him aloof to reminders of the harshness of their adopted reality.
As with any movie of a similar ilk, how it ends is not of particular consequence, as much as how the story gets them to that final climax. Jon Voight appears under significant makeup in the movie's third act as Adolph Rupp, renowned coach of the University of Kentucky, whom Texas Western meets in the 1966 NCAA championship game. Voight not only adopts his mannerisms and vocal cadence, but as far as the story is concerned, he provides a stiff reminder for Haskins about the weight and significance of the young coach's situation in a context that he can fully understand. His role in the film itself may be minor, but the implications of his presence alone are key to the completion of Haskins' journey in terms of both emotion and character. Rupp is portrayed as trepidant, standoffish and slightly defiant in his exchanges with Haskins, both direct and indirect; he is the wry, time-tested counterpoint to Haskins' eager, youthful go-getter. One can infer that Rupp's attitude has racial undertones similar to those shown by the boosters (it is true that Rupp had not recruited a black player up to that point), but it can also be reasonably understood that Rupp takes Haskins as a competent and even prescient basketball mind, recognizing his talents and abilities while remaining somewhat unsure about his decisions. Haskins made the decision to put out an all-black lineup in the championship game, against Rupp's all-white lineup, which provides a conveniently literal, albeit, still true framing of the conflict as a whole.
A late-era holiday like Martin Luther King Day often gets drowned by heaps of pusillanimous drivel about the Civil Rights leader's importance in the establishment of racial equality (they were important to be sure, but the level of monologuing about the man has badly over-simplified and romanticized his contributions). For the most part, Glory Road manages to stay within the confines of safe-yet-effective commentary, even as we all understand through and through that the period encompassing the Civil Rights movement was tumultuous and even violent. If he was indeed kept largely unaware of the controversy surrounding him up until the final game, the driving factor behind Haskins' radical strategies may have been his drive to win at all costs, controversial or otherwise, rather than a conscious effort to offer a milquetoast Civics lesson to crusty advocates of an ancient disposition. Time is as effective as anything in hyperbolizing unprecedented occurrences like the Kentucky-Texas Western championship game in 1966, but stepping back to observe the entire picture provides a more realistic perspective.
Glory Road is a sharp, crisply made, thoroughly modern product that spares no detail or expense, but it is not without soul. (In spite of being a Jerry Bruckheimer production.) It is very much the spiritual cousin of a film like Walk the Line in the sense that its execution may appear rather pedestrian, but dig just a little deeper and you'll find a film lifted up by the sheer magnitude of its subject and the performances within it. It isn't on the level of Walk the Line, but saying that is to degrade it very little. There isn't a single thing out of place within Glory Road; Lucas is spot-on as the hard-driving Coach Haskins, probably the best performance of his career so far, and Emily Deschanel runs with what little she's given and adds an emotional urgency to the proceedings, especially later on in the film. In fact, the movie may have benefited even more from some deeper exposition, a minor shortcoming that could be remedied with the release of a Director's Cut DVD later on. But as it is, Glory Road is a perfectly good reason to venture out to the theatre during the New Year's barren early weeks. A degree in Basketball 101 is not required to enjoy it, either, just an appreciation for a well done, uplifting story.
GLORY ROAD
Directed by: James Gartner
Starring: Josh Lucas, Derek Luke, Emily Deschanel, Jon Voight