Audio By Carbonatix
American Sniper notwithstanding, the first fresh multiplex trend to emerge in 2015 is Old White Dudes Learning to Share Their World. First came Kevin Costner in the sour Black or White, playing a coot who discovers that black folks love their kids, too, even in South Los Angeles. Then, in the Lucasfilm princess bomb Strange Magic, a plump fairy king looking exactly like George Lucas himself comes to grips with the fact that his flitting, ivory-skinned daughter wants to marry the film’s brown-skinned, gnome-like comic-relief sidekick. After recovering, the Lucas-king actually pronounces that he’ll no longer judge anyone based on their appearance — a lesson he speaks of as if he were the first one to think of it.
And now here’s Disney’s McFarland, USA, directed by Niki Caro, the first of this lot not to feel as though the executives who approved it got canned after the first test screening. It works — kind of — despite its broadness, its obviousness and its howlingly awful opening: Kevin Costner (again), playing coach Jim White, drives his family to a taqueria in McFarland, their new town, a dusty farming community near Bakersfield. Costner ambles to the counter, squints at his choices, and looks baffled when a woman rattles off the specialties: tacos, burritos, enchiladas.
He asks, with confounded desperation, “Don’t you have a burger?”
Eventually, the Whites settle on these mysterious “tacos,” and afterward, they panic at the sight of something the movie seems to think that you, the viewer, will agree is terrifying: Mexican-American men rolling down the street in customized lowriders.
How will Costner’s White go from queso-fearing gringo to a man so in touch with his community that, at the climax, he’ll confess to the sons of fruit-pickers that there’s “a kind of privilege that someone like me takes for granted”? He gets there through inspirational sports action, of course, and the cross-cultural celebration of hard work — and a shared disdain for the prep-school have-it-alls of Palo Alto.
Also, a sweet abuelita gives White a live chicken, and everyone in town gets together to throw his daughter a surprise quinceañera, so even the build-a-fence crowd in Costner’s fan base might go along with this. After all, the trick with most fearful old white folks is that they quite like the minorities they know and work with. It’s the ones they haven’t met who must be massing together to destroy everything that once was great about America.
The film is well made, well acted, and sometimes beautiful. The sport here is cross-country; the real-life White founded and coached McFarland’s team, leading an underfunded squad of after-school farm laborers to triumph against California’s best-funded schools. There are many stirring shots of the boys racing through the hard dirt and honeyed light of the San Joaquin Valley; there are sunsets to relish as they dash up and down plastic-covered heaps of almonds. The camera glides along bluffs and reservoirs, the filmmakers taking every advantage of the orange groves and scrub-brushed hills the kids charge through.
Costner’s face has a lot in common with those landscapes. It’s golden, time-toughened and immediately arresting, but harsh enough that you have to warm up to it. Once in a while, in just the right conditions, it blooms. Costner was the best thing in Black or White, but even he couldn’t quite make his character’s jumble of traits cohere into anything resembling a person. Here, once his White starts connecting with the kids, he’s much better. There’s something affecting about his gruffness and hangdog squinting, a suggestion that the American future he’s staring into isn’t exactly what he expected, but it’s something he can rise to.
Costner’s old white guy gets razzed some, but he’s never a clown. Of course, he also has his moments of telling people not like him how to get their lives together — but this time, at least, he seems concerned, well-meaning. The film is like a two-hour version of a Brad Paisley hit: It’s well-crafted fluff that’s actually quite serious, an attempt at easing the discomfort of its target audience about the ways our lives are changing.
