Release Date: January 14, 2005
Starring: Samuel L. Jackson, Rob Brown, Ashanti, Antwon Tanner, Rick Gonzalez, Channing Tatum, Robert Ri'chard, Nana Gbewonyo, Denise Dowse
Directed by: Thomas Carter
Written by: Mark Schwahn, John Gatins
Distributed by: Paramount Pictures
MPAA Rating: PG-13 (violence, sexual content, language, teen partying, some drug material)
My, how times have changed. The high school basketball drama Coach Carter is basically a remake of Hoosiers (or, perhaps, Hoosiers blended with The Substitute), but the challenges faced by the coach in this movie -- Ken Carter, played by Samuel L. Jackson -- are more numerous and more serious than anything Norman Dale, the Gene Hackman character in Hoosiers, had to confront. Back then (the movie was made in 1986, but took place in the early 50’s), the biggest thing a coach had to worry about was getting run out of town after a losing season. Now, in the roughneck city of Richmond, California, Carter has to field a winning team amid a maelstrom of declining education standards for black players, inner-city violence, and national media attention.
Coach Carter is, admittedly, a liberal’s wet dream -- education for black kids, and an end to the vicious cycle of poverty in the ghetto! -- but it is based on real-life events and features a strong performance by Jackson (equal to Hackman’s in Hoosiers) as Carter that enables the film to transcend the mold exploited by other teen sports dramas like Friday Night Lights. Jackson is, of course, an imposing presence, but he is as much a character actor as he is an A-list celebrity, and for Carter he draws from both sides of his screen persona. This is a performance in which the actor brings the confidence of a bankable star but the subtlety of a veteran bit player.
It helps that he is blessed with a great first scene (one that is remarkably similar to Hackman’s first scene in Hoosiers): Having taken over the coaching job at Richmond High School, he demands respect from his players and encourages them to show the same respect for themselves and to each other. He addresses each of them as “sir” and soon has them doing the same to him. He does not allow his players to call each other “nigger.” He cuts their egos down to size; every player who does not follow his regimen is expendable. And what a regimen it is: He conditions his players with hundreds of push-ups and thousands of sprints -- a measure of discipline, but one that also ensures they will outlast their opponents on the court.
The more radical side of Carter is that he also insists his players meet basic academic standards so that they can go to college, and when they do not, he cancels practices and even games -- costing the team an undefeated season -- to make sure the players are in the library studying. His plan naturally meets with opposition from parents, and the school’s principal (Denise Dowse) also asks him to cut back. You can hear in their complaints an echo of the themes explored in Friday Night Lights: High school athletes from poor cities usually find the rest of their lives to be a long, irreversible downhill slide, so why not let them enjoy the good times while they last? Carter doesn’t buy it. In one scene he asks his players what they want out of the season; their answer is unanimous: to win the state championship. Then Carter asks them who won the championship last year. Not one of them can say.
This is why Coach Carter is more effective than most high school sports dramas. Instead of focusing on the team’s fortunes on the court, which, regardless of the coach’s dedication, ultimately falls to the players and, in the movies, usually culminates in the Big Game That Comes Down to the Last Shot, it turns its attention to the team’s success off the court. According to the closing subtitles, six of the Richmond players went on to college and five of them on scholarships, something that certainly wouldn’t have happened without Carter’s influence. He sums it up in his last words to the players: “I came here to coach athletes, and you became students. I came here to teach boys, and you became men.”
Coach Carter, directed by Thomas Carter (no relation) and written by Mark Schwahn and John Gatins, still has a lot of the typical teen sports-movie moments. The games go by in a blur, and the players -- the most prominent of which are smart guy Kenyon (Rob Brown), wisecracker Worm (Antwon Tanner), gangster Timo (Rick Gonzalez), token white guy Jason (Channing Tatum), and Carter’s son Damien (Robert Ri’chard), and tall, silent Junior (Nana Gbewonyo) -- are two-dimensional. Timo gets sucked up into a subplot that pits the bling-bling allure of the drug-dealing gangster lifestyle against the Carter-endorsed straight-and-narrow, which neatly wraps itself up when Timo is scared straight after one of his buddies gets shot and killed. The Richmond High players land themselves in a spot of trouble when they are seduced by white girls from suburbia while on the road for an invitational tournament. And Kenyon has his own woman troubles: His pregnant girlfriend Kyra (Ashanti) nags him to buy into her dream of a life together after high school -- and then turns sour when he talks about going to college.
But the movie is just as notable for what it does not do. The Big Game that it builds up to is not really that big, and by the end of the movie the basketball has become almost incidental. It avoids mining the relationship between Carter and his son Damien -- who starts the movie off at a private school but transfers to Richmond High when Carter takes the coaching job there -- as a source of tension. For the most part the voice-over broadcaster narration that many sports films use to distill drama from the game scenes is absent. It never compromises the Carter character, even on story points as small as the game-day coat-and-tie dress code that he requires: When one of the parents objects that their son cannot afford a coat and tie, Carter points the way to a Goodwill store and its selection of 50-cent neckties.
The coats and ties are Carter’s way of demanding self-respect from his players, not only because they identify the boys as serious and ambitious to the rest of the world but because they certify them as indifferent to the passing trends of youth fashion. Norman Dale never made his players wear coats and ties on game days. He didn’t have to. He coached at a rural Indiana high school in the 50’s, where things like inner-city crime and national high school basketball rankings and SportsCenter didn’t exist. But he could probably still succeed today, and even in Richmond, because what makes him the same as Carter is what makes both of them great, inspirational characters whose lessons cross temporal and racial boundaries: Self-respect comes first, even before the game. Everything else will follow.
-- Craig Roush (craigroush@hotmail.com)