WE ARE MARSHALL
The day I began my stint as a professional student at Marshall University, way back in 1976, the shock waves from the crash of Southern Airways Flight 932 still rippled the morale of the local Huntington population. Six years earlier, on the evening on November 14, 1970, the chartered plane that carried seventy-five football players, boosters, coaches and crew, drew bad weather, tried to avoid it, and crashed just one mile short of the Tri-State runway, killing all the passengers. I knew nothing of this tragedy the day I wandered around the campus, looking for Harris Hall, where my Intro Psych class had already started. But I could discern that something crippling had happened. Anyone could have detected it. The tired shoulders of the short-skirted girls, the sunken eyes of the wizened faculty, the dazed expressions on the maintenance crew's faces: everywhere you looked, people with no acting experience whatsoever tried to compensate for their own personal destruction by trying to behave as if nothing was wrong. This was Huntington, West Virginia. Something was always wrong. If it wasn't the snide condescension of outsiders mocking John Denver's tribute song, it was the industrial exploiters ravaging the once-pristine landscape. Even more than one hundred miles from the nearest active coal mine, black soil hung in the air on the sunniest of days. When you opened the door to a grocery store, you were met with the rattle of an old air conditioner tempered by a silent wave of human despair. People may no longer have worked their personal feelings of the plane crash into every conceivable conversation, but that was only because there was no longer a need to do so. Everyone who had lived in the area either knew someone who had died that horrible night, or knew someone who knew someone who had. Like the rust of an old jalopy, grief was much of what was holding Huntington together in those days.
In a lot of schools, Marshall among them, the community that built up around the university was tie to athletics. This is no coincidence. Ivory academicians and their pencil-clutching administrators learned a long time ago that the best way to prevent the townsfolk from resenting the hell out of the college students is to unite the two sides (working class and middle class) through sports, and especially through football. For all intents and purposes, after the plane crash that destroyed the Thundering Herd, Marshall no longer had a football team. Because of regulations preventing freshmen from playing Varsity ball, talk had been widespread that the university might suspend the program altogether.
By the time I graduated in 1982, the football team had amassed a miserable record. Indeed, during the 1970s, Marshall had the worst record in all of college football. It may therefore surprise you to learn that morale had soared in some quarters in those days, and not only because I was at long last leaving the institution.
A beautiful fountain rises up out of the center of the entryway to Marshall's student union. Created by sculptor Harry Bertoia, the Memorial Student Center Fountain stretches over thirteen feet overhead and through the years has been used by some students for not altogether sacred purposes, a fact that I like to think would have slyly amused those who perished in the wreckage. We see a bit of the sculpture in We Are Marshall (2006), along with much of the local community.
I cannot with certainty tell you the exact purpose of this movie. As a biopic, it does not need to justify itself. I can, however, tell you what it does not aspire to do. It makes no effort to evoke cheap sentimentality. It does not grind grief in your face. It does not create heroes where they do not exist. And it certainly is not the football equivalent of Lassie Come Home. Rather than focus on the plane crash, director McG (whose previous film credits gave no indication of his abilities to touch the heart with such humanity) sharpens his camera on the rebuilding processes--both the emotional and the real. Coach Jack Lengyel, played to the edge of amazement by Matthew McConaughey, comes from a nowhere town to a college surrounded by people with minds paralyzed by shock--by a town that actually seethes with the need to exist--enlists a defeated administration, exploits the naive dreams of the few surviving players (those who did not attend the away game), and gains his own inspiration from the bare bones yearning of the town and school to resist death.
As great as McConaughey's supporting actors are (among them Matthew Fox as Red Dawson and David Strathairn as the University president), the real support comes from the football practice sessions and the game itself. A lot of movies have tried to replicate the sense of being involved on the field during the big game. Few have come close. We Are Marshall rebuilds the sense of that conflux of sensations not only from the perspective of the fans but, far more to the point, from the awareness of being right there in the middle of the fifty-yard line, with all the actions and reactions snapping in a ballet of military-style combat.
It is, in the final analysis, more than an inspiring film. Rather, it is the sports equivalent of high art, something whose aim is irrelevant, and its results inescapable. True beauty has nothing to do with the eye of the beholder. True art, as with beauty, presses its objectivity right up against you and dares you to blink. When you cannot look away, you know you have met something of genuine value. We Are Marshall is just such a movie.
In a lot of schools, Marshall among them, the community that built up around the university was tie to athletics. This is no coincidence. Ivory academicians and their pencil-clutching administrators learned a long time ago that the best way to prevent the townsfolk from resenting the hell out of the college students is to unite the two sides (working class and middle class) through sports, and especially through football. For all intents and purposes, after the plane crash that destroyed the Thundering Herd, Marshall no longer had a football team. Because of regulations preventing freshmen from playing Varsity ball, talk had been widespread that the university might suspend the program altogether.
By the time I graduated in 1982, the football team had amassed a miserable record. Indeed, during the 1970s, Marshall had the worst record in all of college football. It may therefore surprise you to learn that morale had soared in some quarters in those days, and not only because I was at long last leaving the institution.
A beautiful fountain rises up out of the center of the entryway to Marshall's student union. Created by sculptor Harry Bertoia, the Memorial Student Center Fountain stretches over thirteen feet overhead and through the years has been used by some students for not altogether sacred purposes, a fact that I like to think would have slyly amused those who perished in the wreckage. We see a bit of the sculpture in We Are Marshall (2006), along with much of the local community.
I cannot with certainty tell you the exact purpose of this movie. As a biopic, it does not need to justify itself. I can, however, tell you what it does not aspire to do. It makes no effort to evoke cheap sentimentality. It does not grind grief in your face. It does not create heroes where they do not exist. And it certainly is not the football equivalent of Lassie Come Home. Rather than focus on the plane crash, director McG (whose previous film credits gave no indication of his abilities to touch the heart with such humanity) sharpens his camera on the rebuilding processes--both the emotional and the real. Coach Jack Lengyel, played to the edge of amazement by Matthew McConaughey, comes from a nowhere town to a college surrounded by people with minds paralyzed by shock--by a town that actually seethes with the need to exist--enlists a defeated administration, exploits the naive dreams of the few surviving players (those who did not attend the away game), and gains his own inspiration from the bare bones yearning of the town and school to resist death.
As great as McConaughey's supporting actors are (among them Matthew Fox as Red Dawson and David Strathairn as the University president), the real support comes from the football practice sessions and the game itself. A lot of movies have tried to replicate the sense of being involved on the field during the big game. Few have come close. We Are Marshall rebuilds the sense of that conflux of sensations not only from the perspective of the fans but, far more to the point, from the awareness of being right there in the middle of the fifty-yard line, with all the actions and reactions snapping in a ballet of military-style combat.
It is, in the final analysis, more than an inspiring film. Rather, it is the sports equivalent of high art, something whose aim is irrelevant, and its results inescapable. True beauty has nothing to do with the eye of the beholder. True art, as with beauty, presses its objectivity right up against you and dares you to blink. When you cannot look away, you know you have met something of genuine value. We Are Marshall is just such a movie.
