Directed by: McG
Starring: Matthew McConaughey, Matthew Fox, January Jones, David Strathairn, Ian McShane, Kate Mara, Anthony Mackie
We Are Marshall is a football movie that would have been better off without any football in it. It is based on the true story of the Marshall Thundering Herd (in Huntington, WV) football team that was killed in a horrific plane crash on November 14, 1970. There were no survivors. The only members of the team left were three varsity players that were unable to make the trip and assistant coach Red Dawson (Fox), who gave up his seat on the plane so he could recruit after the team's loss before the fateful flight. The town was emotionally devastated and the thought of fielding a football team the following year was considered disrespectful to the players and coaches that died.
A movie dealing with the town's collective grief and heartbreak would have been a more powerful film. But We Are Marshall is so determined to play football the movie blows by the scenes dealing with the conflicting emotions caused by the crash. For example, Red's wife (Jones) believes her husband was on the plane. She is naturally grief-stricken. In the middle of pouring rain (the movie has a few scenes with such rain), Red races up the driveway to his house to find his wife sobbing at the front door. They rush to embrace and then the scene quickly fades out. I would have liked to hear a conversation between the two about this fortunate twist of fate. Any grieving person fantasizes that their loved one would resurrect or materialize out of thin air. This happened to Mrs. Dawson and the movie doesn't pause to deal with this. It is one of many wasted opportunities in the film.
Months pass and the university decides to field a team for the following year. University President Donald Dedmon (Strathairn) is tasked with finding a new coach. None of the alumni on the short list is interested, so he hires outsider Jack Lengyel (McConaughey). McConaughey plays Lengyel as such a strange goofball that no player or university official would take him seriously. It is a wonder he is even employed, let alone employed as a head football coach. We can not take him seriously for a second. However, Lengyel is able to convince Dedmon to petition the NCAA to allow Marshall to play freshmen, which was not permitted at the time. How? By turning off his inner weirdo just long enough to offer sage advice just when it is needed the most. This happens on at least two or three occasions and rings false every time.
We Are Marshall is so obviously a starring vehicle for McConaughey that it sacrifices all credibility. What a miscalculation. McConaughey should have been asked to dial down the goofiness and give us a coach we can believe actually knows something about football. The real Jack Lengyel was dismayed by McConaughey's performance and for good reason. Lengyel went on to various coaching and athletic director positions after his tenure with Marshall. I highly doubt he was as bizarre as McConaughey portrayed him. Now I know how the real Patch Adams felt after watching Robin Williams portray him as basically a clown.
Marshall does indeed assemble a team of mostly freshmen (the NCAA relented after Deadmon apparently drove from West Virginia to Kansas City during a rainstorm to plead his case). The movie then tacks on the clichés from there, including a first game in which the team looked terribly overmatched followed by The Big Game in which Marshall won on the final play of the game. I have never seen a final play take this long to develop since The Longest Yard. And yes, McConaughey delivers a gung-ho speech to his team while they are assembled as the final resting places of six of the deceased players. There is something off-putting about a team jumping up and down joyously on the gravestones of the departed.
Ian McShane is on hand as the bereaved father of the team quarterback who perished in the crash. He is a big time booster who arranges for Dedmon's ouster, yet a few scenes later we see Dedmon at his desk and then attending the games. Was he fired or not? McShane is against the idea of fielding a team so soon, but he comes off as more of a villain because the movie never truly deals with his feelings. McShane has one of those jobs at a steel mill where he wears a hard hat and stands in front of a fire or molten liquid with sparks flying everywhere. He has conversations with Dedmon and whomever else might deign to visit him at his workplace, but if I were these folks, I'd ask him to at least meet at a location where 8000 degree liquid isn't just a few feet away.
We Are Marshall never treats its subject with the gravitas it deserves. A movie about the healing process of the bereaved town would have been much more effective. Instead, we are saddled with another silly sports movie where winning heals all wounds.
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