Film Review: 'We Are Marshall'

We Are Marshall (4 stars out of 5)
Gimme a hankie, coach. 'We Are Marshall' is genuinely moving.

Roger Moore
Orlando Sentinel Movie Critic
Posted December 22, 2006

'We Are Marshall'

Cast: Matthew McConaughey, David Strathairn, Matthew Fox, Ian McShane.
Director: McG.

Running time: 2 hours, 5 minutes.

Industry rating: PG for emotional thematic material, a crash scene and mild language.

With the flood of entertaining, inspiring and perfectly serviceable sports dramas of the past few years, it's amazing to remember how long it has been since we had a good sports weeper, a "Brian's Song" for the new millennium.

"We Are Marshall" comes close to filling that bill. The requisite "inspiring" parts of this true story, the way the Marshall University football team rose from the ashes of the worst disaster in American college-sports history to play again, are routine. But the sadness and the ways people responded to that 1970 plane crash are genuinely moving.

A pretty good mid-level college football program was all but snuffed out one night, after a game in November 1970. Some 75 people -- coaches, players, the athletic director and prominent boosters -- died a short distance from home in Huntington, W.Va., when their plane went down.

Then, there were the injured players who didn't make the trip: the assistant coach (Matthew Fox of TV's Lost) who gave up his seat on the plane; the cheerleader (Kate Mara) whose fiance was on the team; the town shaker and mover (Ian McShane) whose son was that fiance; and the interim college president (David Strathairn) dropped into a tragedy, not knowing what to do next.

This atypical offering from McG, the guy who gave us the Charlie's Angels movies, stops to mourn. It takes us to memorial services. The movie even opens with a tribute to the crash that's still observed in Huntington to this day.

Some, like the father who lost his son, will embrace their grief with a death grip. Others will shut down entirely. Nobody in town can escape it. Maybe the best thing to do would be to drop the football program, Marshall's beleaguered president reasons.

But the surviving players (Anthony Mackie is their leader) and the student body won't hear of it. Their way of honoring their classmates, they figure, is to pick themselves, the school and the town up, by playing again.

Strathairn's President Dedmon is living the very definition of dilemma. The town won't accept a team reminding them, every Saturday, of their loss. The students won't accept the alternative. Nobody wants the job of building a team from scratch. The NCAA won't cut the school slack on scholarships (freshmen weren't eligible to play back then).

Then, this odd duck from the College of Wooster (Matthew McConaughey) phones. He would like to help. He wants the job.

McConaughey is at his most engaging here. He plays Jack Lengyel as eccentric, upbeat yet realistic, a stoop-shouldered straight-shooter who drawls out of the side of his mouth.

"If it's a miracle you're looking for, keep lookin'."

Pair the hustler (McConaughey) with a deer-in-headlights (Strathairn) and watch the magic.

The film then settles into the familiar rhythms of recruiting montages, "big games" and occasional moments of grief, many provided by Fox, who, as Red Dawson, embodies "survivor's guilt."

Florida State's Bobby Bowden was at Marshall's rival, West Virginia University, at the time, and played a part in this healing. Florida State alumnus (and Winter Park native) Jamie Linden wrote the script, and the narration has the warm, sentimental cadences of Earl Hamner remembering Walton's Mountain.

"Those were not welcome days. We buried sons, brothers, mothers, fathers, fiances. What once was whole, now shattered."

"We Are Marshall" (it's the rally cry of the team) doesn't always have a handle on the grief, but it does keep emotions close to the surface. That allows McConaughey to be the most refreshing, funny and believable he ever has been, even when he's giving the town, the team and us the only message in the movie that matters.

"Sometimes, winning isn't the only thing."

Rmoore@Orlandosentinel.com