Undefeated – Oscar Nominated Documentary!

Undefeated – Oscar Nominated Documentary!

There is a moment in Undefeated that, like so many of the moments in the Oscar-nominated documentary, seems unbelievable. Scripted or storyboarded; contrived in the way those bad MTV shows are. The white, volunteer coach of an all-black, inner-city high-school
football team in Memphis awards his version of player of the week to the ex-juvie linebacker, who’s back from a suspension for fighting with the undersized, too-poor-for-college offensive lineman, who is injured and broken. The bad seed defers his award —
The Uncommon Man Award — to the fallen hero, because that’s how the coach taught him, and you cry, because this is the first football movie since Rudy that you’re allowed to cry along with.

When I ask the coach, Bill Courtney, if he and the team were playing for the cameras, he admitted to being "very cognizant of them" at first, and he said the filmmakers became so embedded with his 2009 Manassas Tigers that they were like the manager who
hands you a towel and a Gatorade and you don’t look back. And then Bill Courtney yelled in a lumber order at his day job and he told me why of course the kid got The Uncommon Man Award that week: "Chavis got that award not because of what he did on the football
field but because he started changing the way he approached life. Let’s be honest: Common men are selfish, common men are flawed, common men will many more times than not make the wrong decisions for a number of different reasons. Uncommon men will make the
hard, unpopular decisions — and better themselves for it."

Bill Courtney is not some white-man saviour of inner-city children. He does not turn the star player with the viral YouTube recruiting video into a D-I signee; he teaches him how to put on cologne to "run hos." He does not really like what he sees in amateur
sports in this country right now ("I think it’s disgusting," he says of Jerry Sandusky and Bernie Fine and Jim Tressel and all that), but he is not concerned with football most of all. Football does not build character, he says — it reveals character. He likes
to talk about the ball’s shape, about standing on top of one: "If your foundation is football, you’re going to fall flat on your ass." Plenty of football coaches like to talk like this, but even Knute Rockne may not have believed himself.

So maybe the thing you should think about when you see Undefeated when it opens this weekend — besides maybe, hey, this should really win an Oscar — is why no one else who should believe like Bill Courtney, actually believes in Bill Courtney, maker of uncommon
men. "It’s not just Mitt Romney," he says when I suggest he could double as a speechwriter. "It’s Barack Obama. It’s everybody! We sit there and we wonder why our economy is screwed up and all you got to look at is, fundamentally, did the people running the
economy act with character and honesty and decency? Or did they act in their own interests and have a lack of integrity and character? The answer is yes, and the whole house of cards fell."

Bill Courtney might as well run for president, I tell him, but he’s coaching his son’s football team now, because the Manassas Tigers need to move on, and so do the linebacker and the lineman, and so does he, and so does everybody else. "That’s very kind,"
he says with an unbreakable hospitality, "but I think I might end up going to jail because I’d kick the living shit out of forty people in that business who desperately needed a shit-kicking." You couldn’t script it any better. It could fix the common man.

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Posted by Fahad Zafar on Feb 17 2012. Filed under Movies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry