'Undefeated': The other 2012 Oscar winner with a black cast
OPINION - In the midst of all 'The Help' controversy, far less attention has gone to that other Oscar 2012 winning movie with a largely black cast -- 'Undefeated'...
In the midst of all The Help controversy, far less attention has been paid to that other Oscar-winning movie with a largely black cast — Undefeated. Although it opened last Friday and boasts Sean “Diddy” Combs as executive producer, it’s not playing in many locations. I was able to attend a screening, however.
Once you get past the possibility of confusing it with the Sarah Palin documentary (The Undefeated), which I’m guessing is not as good, you find out that this film is about Bill Courtney, a white Alabama business owner who volunteers as a football coach in a mostly black inner city school, while one his white friends provides part-time housing for one of the black players so that the young man can get tutoring (no tutor would go out to the student’s neighborhood).
WATCH THE TRAILER OF ‘UNDEFEATED’ HERE:
[youtubevid http://youtube.com/watch?v=f1UlwaWHmzE]
Sure, it sounds like the plot of one of those really bad Hollywood movies that is rightfully heaped with criticism for its cliched racial politics. But this is different — likely because it’s a documentary, not scripted. Unlike say The Blind Side, there is no black teenager strangely following around a white elementary school aged kid for guidance while having no motivation beyond what others tell him to do (common sense dictates that was not an accurate portrayal of NFL player Michael Oher).
Instead, Undefeated is a portrait of one of those really good educators who inspires us with his dedication and perseverance, and a group of players, who, despite facing personal challenges tied to poverty and poor schooling, take initiative in wanting to join and help rebuild a long unpopular team, then earnestly strive to win games and achieve other goals like going to college.
As with most sports movies, it says something about life that goes far beyond a high school football field in Alabama. One of the most striking lines in the film is when the Coach Courtney says, “Everybody says when you get these inner city kids down, they’ll lay over and you’ll beat them by 40. Not us!” As we all know, too many inner city kids from across the country can seem down — years of poor educational opportunities in crumbling schools, poverty, fatherlessness…. And everybody assumes that those other kids will easily be able to beat them.
And, unfortunately for black youth, there is a long history of disparate opportunities and the outcomes to match. Like the coach says, “This is an unbelievably good opportunity. Twenty nothing. You come back from that, now you’re talking about something.”
Since this is, in some ways, a typical sports movie, I don’t think it is too much of a spoiler to say that some winning happens. What’s clear is that this is, in significant part, due to a coach who, even while looking at the impossible (the school hadn’t won a playoff game in its more than 100 years of history), believed, and encouraged his players to believe. He strongly considers giving up on Chavis Daniels (a talented player who’s just spent 15 months in youth detention), at first wanting to kick him off the team, and then deciding on a long suspension — we learn later that, apparently off camera, the coach talked to the player every day of his suspension.
The result? Daniels does what all kids do — steps up the bar raised by coaches (and teachers, communities, states, countries) that genuinely care about them and invest time and resources in them.
So why can’t we just do more of that? We can do more to help low-income men and reduce poverty. Our actions don’t have to be as perfect and neat as a Hollywood plot and ending — that’s life — but they should be as real as a good documentary.
Joy Moses is a Senior Policy Analyst with the Poverty and Prosperity program at the Center for American Progress.
