This seems to be the season for inspirational, fact-based underdog stories, and we’ve got another good one.
Indeed, I’m surprised it took so long for this astonishing saga to hit the big screen.
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| As a meager few spectators watch, coach Rusty Russell (Luke Wilson, left), Doc Hall (Martin Sheen, right) and a dispirited Snoggs (Jacob Lofland) contemplate the disaster unfolding on the football field. |
Events begin when Rusty Russell (Luke Wilson), his wife Juanita (Vinessa Shaw) and their little daughter Betty (Josie Fink) drive onto the grounds of the Fort Worth Masonic Widows and Orphans Home. Rusty has just become the institution’s head football coach: a significant step down from his previous successful position at Temple High School, and a decision made even stranger by the fact that Fort Worth Masonic doesn’t have a football team.
Heck, it doesn’t even have a football field: merely an open stretch of gravel, rocks and grass occupied by scrawny goats.
(The actual Russell had a good reason for this apparently rash and impulsive decision: a crucial detail poorly hinted at, in the otherwise solid script by Roberts, Lane Garrison and Kevin Meyer. Brief and vague flashbacks to Russell’s WWI trench experience aren’t sufficient.)
The challenge seems insurmountable, given that most of the older boys — the few with any potential, only 12 of whom qualify — are as scrawny as the aforementioned goats. They’re also an unkempt, ill-mannered and under-education bunch, with a tendency to quarrel and fight each other. That’s particularly true of the newest arrival, Hardy Brown (Jake Austin Walker), delivered — his clothes ominously covered in fresh blood — by the local sheriff.
Most of the other boys go by nicknames: Snoggs (Jacob Lofland), Wheatie (Slade Monroe), Fairbanks (Levi Dylan) and so forth.
Their belligerence and uncooperative natures aside, the enormity of Rusty’s endeavor becomes clear when the field is cleared for the first practice. He expected the absence of anything resembling uniforms, but the boys don’t even have shoes. Nor is there a football, so Juanita and Betty improvise a substitute.
Despite all this, Rusty remains hopeful; he senses an inner spirit, a yearning for pride, waiting to be nurtured. He understands that those who have nothing, and are given an opportunity to amount to something, will fight like hell to embrace and retain it.
