Glory Road is a Touchstone Pictures release.
Wide theatrical release January 13.
Directed by James Gartner
Screenplay by Christ Cleveland
Starring: Josh Lucas, Alphonso MacAuley, Al Shearer, Sam Jones III, Damain Radcliffe
Rated PG for racial issues including violence and epithets, and momentary language.
Running time: 106 minutes.
Alex’s Rating: 6 out of 10.
What is a reviewer to do when an inspiring story is not an inspiring movie? Glory Road is the story of Don Haskins and his basketball teams march to the NCAA men’s basketball championship in 1966.
In the context of the movie, what makes the story of this team from Texas Western College (now known as the University of Texas at El Paso) is that throughout the season, Haskins regularly played his seven black players, and then in the championship game played only his black players, making this the first all-black starting line-up to win that championship.
© Disney Enterprises, Inc.
That right there is part of the problem—making a strongly emotional connection. It simply takes too many words to describe the “first” and it exists at the end of a long line of firsts: first black NCAA athlete, first black NCAA basketball player, first black NCAA starter, first black NCAA starter in the South, first NCAA team with multiple black starters, first such team to make the NCAA championship tournament. With each of these firsts that came before, it makes this story seem more an incremental change than a paradigmatic fracture.
Care needs to be taken, though, not to diminish the ordeal of the individuals involved. Finding it within yourself to perform under the pressure of intense cruelty and humiliation is no less amazing for someone else having done it as well.
Unfortunately, though, the movie is not so much about the individual drive that allowed this success but rather about the sequence of events that resulted in five black men standing together at the beginning of a basketball game. Perhaps I am too callous, but I am not moved by that number being five much more than if it had been four, three, two, or even one (as it was on the opposing team). Where the movie succeeds is when it is focused on the personal integrity of the people instead of the athletic accomplishments of the group.
Almost axiomatic in stories such as this is that the achievement of the minority can only be acheived with the complicitness of someone from the majority, and it is an almost universal flaw in stories such as these that in telling of blacks overcoming historic cultural racism, all of the attention will be on the one white character who gave it to them.
This flaw is avoided for the most part in Glory Road. Although Josh Lucas’s Don Haskins is the central figure of the film, his travails with school administrators and racist threats never overshadow the much worse treatment heaped upon his players. Too little attention is given, however, to the individuals on the team, and you’ll likely leave the theater unable to name more than a couple of the players. As a result, the movie ends with it feeling more like Haskins’ accomplishment than the players.
© Disney Enterprises, Inc.
The early focus of the film is all on Haskins and his search for quality starting players. Initially Josh Lucas feels completely wrong for the role, too uncomfortable with the cliched motivational speeches he’s required to give and just dropping one line after another. He eventually settles in as the dialog becomes less dramatic. The audience is physically worn down with him as he slowly realizes that while he justs wants it to be about him playing the best players he has, nobody is going to let it be that easy.
On the team, not much opportunity is given to the individuals to stand out as only basic personal backstories are provided for each black player, and mostly in a montage at the beginning before you know who they are, making it difficult to reattach stories to players once they’ve become familiar. Al Shearer stands out as Nevil Shed, a player who first has to find in himself the ambition to succeed in Division I basketball and then later to continue after suffering the movie’s most direct racist assault.
Director James Gartner shows more restraint than I’ve come to expect from commercial directors getting their first big shot at the big screen. The camera mostly sits still while the edits aren’t overwhelming in their frequency or abruptness, even during the ballgames. Gartner does fail to follow in the recent tradition of Disney sports movies where the game film has been absolutely amazing. Gartner generally isn’t able to inject much excitement into the game sequences and relies too much on play-by-play voiceovers to keep the audience informed of what is going on.
This is a story though, that doesn’t call for much visual trickery. And Gartner made a decision to keep the pace steady and constantly moving towards the finale. The film likely would have benefited from wandering down a couple blind alleys or pausing for a moment to breathe more life into some of the characters. That is hard to do with a 12-person team and probably explains why the film seems uncomfortable whenever a woman slips into the story (and there are only three of them), eager to move on from whatever necessity brings them into the picture.
Glory Road is not a bad movie and if you plunk down your $10 to see it, you won’t leave feeling burned. Neither, though, is it transcendent, generally sticking to both the conventions of sports underdog movies and overcoming-oppression movies (which, when you think about it, tend not to be all that different in terms of story arc). If you have young children, Glory Road is probably not appropriate due to a couple scenes of racial bigotry and violence that may be incomprehensible. For slightly older children, though, it may be a good opportunity to expose them to some of the idiocies of our past (that continue in ways into our present) in a format that isn’t extremely graphic. In other words, it could start a good conversation.
