Director likes the movie’s contradictions
Spoiler alert: “When the Game Stands Tall” is not about football. Or at least, it’s less about a high school football team’s remarkable winning streak than it is about the people who made the team remarkable in other ways.
It’s also the second film from director Thomas Carter based on the true stories of dedicated, highly principled coaches who were less interested in winning games than in mentoring teens. (His 2005 film, “Coach Carter,” stars Samuel L. Jackson as an inner-city basketball coach who turned a failing high school team into an undefeated powerhouse.)
“When the Game Stands Tall,” opening Friday, profiles coach Bob Ladouceur, who led California’s De La Salle Spartans to a record-shattering win streak.
“Bob Ladouceur’s a great character,” Carter said while visiting his native Texas to promote the film. “The real-life Bob, whom I met and thought was just such an amazing, inspiring guy, is a great coach, but what he’s excellent at is teaching. Bob’s whole raison d’être is not coaching football, but raising and developing responsible young men. He’s teaching how to be successful in
the game of life.”
The film opens at the pinnacle of the Spartans’ streak, which has spanned more than a decade. When the mounting pressure to win becomes more of a curse than a blessing, the Catholic high school team begins to unravel. Players and coach alike face daunting challenges on and off the field.
The movie has all the hallmarks of a classic sports drama. What sets it apart are the quirks that make this football team unlike any other. The Spartans are teenage boys who share their feelings, who hug each other and say “I love you.” They jog onto the field at the start of every game in pairs, holding hands.
“That’s part of Bob’s system: to get the student athletes to share their feelings, to share their fears,” Carter explained. “He believes that opening up allows the boys to be closer, maybe to feel more vulnerable. But he feels that in that vulnerability is great strength.”
Played with an unsmiling intensity by Jim Caviezel (who played a similarly intense Jesus in “The Passion of the Christ”), Ladouceur is an icon of tough love, a beloved father figure to his players. But he struggles to connect with his own teenage son, and sometimes seems as distant from his family as he is close to his students.
“The movie is filled with those kinds of contradictions, which I like,” Carter said, adding that they help humanize the coach.
Ladouceur teaches religious studies in addition to coaching, and both he and the players sometimes quote Scripture. One player notably rejects the coach’s religious tenets, pointing out that they don’t win games because they’re good Catholics, but because they’re good athletes.
“I didn’t set out to make a faith-based movie,” Carter said. “But I wanted it to have those elements simply because that’s part of what happens in this school structure. I wanted to present honestly these themes of faith, both from the perspective of a Catholic high school coach and from the perspective of some kid going through tough times, when he’s lost a parent or seen the ravages of his community.”
Texas background
Although not religious himself, and not a former football player, Carter grew up immersed in a culture of faith — and football — in Smithville, a small town outside Austin, in the 1960s. He attended a segregated school, and, by the time it integrated, he already was chafing to leave Texas but stayed long enough to earn a theater degree from Texas State University, then known as Southwest Texas State.
“I wanted to be in film, and I wanted to be in a more progressive environment,” he said. “I felt that my ideas were moving far beyond where Texas was at the time.”
When he started working as an actor in the 1970s, though, he discovered that Hollywood was not so far beyond Texas. With a solidly middle-class background, Carter found few roles for black characters who were anything like himself. He had to “street it up” at auditions to get parts, as he once told a Chicago Tribune reporter.
He made the leap from acting to directing in part to help change that. Noting the dearth of TV dramas about middleclass black families, he developed one: “Under One Roof,” starring James Earl Jones. It ran for six episodes in 1995 before being canceled.
Today, it’s still unusual to see a black family at the center of a TV drama, he acknowledges. But Hollywood has become more diverse in other ways.
“What I’m hopeful about is the kind of casting that Shonda Rhimes (the creator of “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Scandal”) is doing,” he said. “Here is a black executive producer who’s proven that you can have an ethnically diverse cast, have no one care — because that’s the world they see — and have really strong TV shows.”
Carter, who has won three Emmy Awards for directing, might turn back to the small screen for his next project: He’s developing several multicultural shows and hoping one will get picked up.
“I’m interested in interesting characters, and I’d like for some of those characters to be black characters, or Latino characters,” he said. “I think the Latino community is vastly underserved on TV as a real community, as a real culture. I’d like to be a part of that change.”