And I never thought I’d live to plug a show airing on ESPN, but that’s where this one is airing.
At noon Tuesday PT. Set your VCRs. Because “Moriarty” proclaimed last March that …
… the film is fucking magic.
I'm not a big sports freak, but I can appreciate the poetry of each particular game. Baseball has its distinct charms. I've always been partial to watching basketball, myself. And then there's high school football. For much of America, it's not a sport; it's a culture, a way of life. High school football is what makes it all go around. Towns rise and fall based on how their team does. There are great stories told every year, with every new season, all over the country. This is one of those great stories, and it was captured and assembled with astonishing finesse by Alex Weinress and Tim Murray. This film takes us through the last year in the head coaching career of Mike Pettine, the man who gave CB West High School a 45-0 record during his last three years, who delivered three state championships in a row in addition to all the titles his teams won before. A documentary like this ultimately either works or doesn't based on how much you want to watch the main character, and Pettine is endlessly interesting. He's a ball of fire when he's coaching, yelling and browbeating his players, terrifying when things aren't working, but he's also shown with his grandson in some sweet, quiet moments. His relationship with his grandson, still just a toddler, is uncomplicated, a marked contrast from his relationship with his son, called "Junior" by everyone, who is the head coach for North Penn High School's football program, one of the main rivals of CB West, and the final regular season opponent they'll face in the season.
If someone were to have written this story as a screenplay, you'd never believe it. The cast of characters is too rich, too well-defined. The makers of ANY GIVEN SUNDAY and REMEMBER THE TITANS may have been after very different things as filmmakers, but they both could have learned valuable lessons from this film. Here, the storytelling involving the characters is clean, simple, precise. We learn a lot from the smallest of moments. The players themselves are a constant surprise, and I'm not going to ruin it by describing them to you. They are all remarkable kids in their own ways, and getting to know each of them over the course of the film is a joy. The games themselves are very well-shot, and they are cut so that even if you don't understand football, you'll understand what's going on here. CB West is awesome to behold at their best moments, and they roll through the 1998 season without looking back. On the few occasions they find themselves up against genuinely demanding teams, they rise to the occasion in ways bordering on the miraculous.
It all comes down to a game on a field in Hershey, Pennsylvania that is an emotional roller-coaster. Watching the way it unfolds is one of the purest film pleasures I've had in a while, and the ending is a powerhouse. I'd love to see this with a crowd of people who really got into it. To me, this is the sort of ending that every weak-ass ROCKY rehash of the past 25 years has been trying to accomplish, and it's real. Once again, I find that a great documentary manages to give me a rush that fiction simply can't match. These are real lives we see unfolding in this film, and the accomplishments they manage as a team are inspirational. … Seek it out. It's a great movie about family and community and success and the price of dreams, and it was easily the highlight of my week.
"Moriarty" out.
