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| Coach Carter
Directed By: Thomas Carter Plot
Summary - Review 1 - Review
2 - CURRENT REVIEWS
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| Samuel L. Jackson plays the controversial high school basketball coach who benched his undefeated team due to their collective poor academic record in 1999. [TRAILER] “Coach Carter” is a moralistic movie in the spirit of an after-school special, falling somewhere between inspirational sermon and cautionary tale. But each time it risks devolving into the routine, preachy clichés of so many other feel-good spectacles, it finds ways to redeem itself and to be relevant to a society and a culture that is too often whitewashed in mainstream cinema. It’s difficult to explain the way “Coach Carter” affected me. I was reminded of talks with grandparents, when I sighed and rolled my eyes as they attempted to impart some lesson they’ve learned in their lives. Then, just when I felt as if they couldn’t misunderstand me more, they made comments or observations that cut through me like a knife, as I realized they have indeed experienced the same exact struggles as me. By all accounts, most will expect “Coach Carter” to be about a basketball coach and his team. Based on a real story, Ken Carter (Samuel L. Jackson) is the controversial high school coach who benched his undefeated basketball team in 1999 because they were not making the cut in terms of grades and school attendance. Taking charge of his inner-city team, his filmed persona first must beat down his player’s egos, teach them fundamentals, and then help them to overcome a school system, city and culture that teaches them to accept failure and that sports are all that matters. Yet reviewing my notes, I’m shocked by how little I wrote about their games or their quest for the ever-important state championship. Instead, with a surprising degree of candor, director Thomas Carter (“Save the Last Dance”) colors in the background of these dribbler’s lives. What he turns up, in a PG-13 form mind you, is a world of lust, drugs, underage pregnancies, young families, racism and, above all, despair. These are not the affluent students of Arrowhead High School, but kids who have been left to fend for themselves, never told to aim for college and never encouraged to be better than the generation that preceded them. Carter walks onto the court and, as expected, takes a hard line. Doing his best Al Pacino impression, in a performance that exudes confidence, Carter barks orders at the boys, rebuffs each of their unprofessional or rude outbursts with physical penalties (500 pushups, for example), and willingly cuts the team’s lead scorer to prove that he is the man in charge. It is when one of his demands is not met – that his players maintain a 2.3 grade point average – that Carter finally snaps, locking the gym and forfeiting multiple games until his players deliver on their promise to open their books and exercise their minds. This could have been a sappy film, and part of it is. In fact, the basketball games and sports motifs are not all that dramatic and their quest for the state title is surprisingly unremarkable. What I remember instead are the scenes of players at their homes, with their pregnant girlfriends, slowly evolving from thoughts of baby clothing to, thanks to Coach Carter, thoughts of college and scholarships. I recall the altercations between Carter and the school’s principal (Denise Dowse), who wishes Carter would lower his expectations and just let the boys play. I am also moved by the subplot of a player who stands on the brink of becoming a drug dealer, the film’s scene about abortion, the debates about racism and sportsmanship that give the film an entirely different dimension, and the subtle commentary on the disappearing federal funds for our nation’s neediest schools, leaving so many children behind. Much like my grandparents, the film feels forced and contrived until suddenly it lets you in on the secret that it knows precisely what it’s talking about, and knows what these kids, and their world, are really like. And like a blow, the fake Disney-like sentimentality melts away into a movie of refreshing idealism, and occasional doses of sobering honesty.
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