The Task: Watch and write about every movie on my shelf, in order (Blu-rays are sorted after DVDs), by June 10, 2015. Remaining movies: 143 Days to go: 96
Movie #295: We Are Marshall
A little history here: My first husband grew up in West Virginia, and he’s been a lifelong fan of Marshall football. When we were married, we visited Huntington quite a few times. We went to a lot of games, whenever we could. (I still tend to follow their seasons, because affection for a team can long outlast the relationship that spawned it.) We cheered them on and bought University gear and even ran into a player or two out in the wild from time to time. (When I was pregnant with my son, in fact, a week shy of my due date, we saw Byron Leftwich in a framing store of all places. He was a giant hulk of a man.) Huntington is a small city, a close community, a college town. It’s the kind of place that feels welcoming and serene, next to that big, wide Ohio River. It’s not much, really, and yet it’s beautiful.
In 1999, Marshall went undefeated. This was the second year of the BCS championship for Division 1-A teams, but there was no such thing as a BCS buster team back then. If you weren’t from a power conference, it was an impressive accomplishment to win all your games, but it wasn’t going to get you into a BCS bowl. Marshall finished the year ranked #10. It was enough. It was spectacular.
Marshall was in the Mid-American Conference then (the MAC), and the MAC Championship game was held on December 3, 1999 in Huntington, on Marshall’s home field. It was cold, and threatening rain. Western Michigan was up 20-0 when we went into halftime, and when the second half started, the rain did too. Nobody left their seats, though. Western Michigan then scored another 3, and with a 23-0 deficit, Marshall’s perfect season was seriously threatened. Then they started to score, but not quite enough. With a minute left in the game, the score was 30-27 and Marshall was still down. Quarterback Chad Pennington took the snap and ran thirty yards down the field to the Western Michigan 30, and with seven seconds left, he threw the winning touchdown. Marshall won 34-30, and everybody rushed the field. I mean everybody, including us. In the melee I ran into wide receiver Nate Poole and congratulated him on a good game. “Thanks, baby,” he said, and I felt like a blushing schoolgirl. Students cheered and celebrated and tore down the goal posts, and one of those posts wound up being carried off the field entirely. We half-followed, half-helped-carry that goal post all the way up campus, to the Memorial Fountain featured at the start and the end of this movie. And then these reveling college kids became reverent. They dedicated that game, that season, that legacy and maybe even that goalpost to their fallen brothers — the players, coaches and fans who perished in that awful plane crash almost 30 years earlier (before any of these students were even glimmers in their daddies’ eyes — even before I was). It was quite possibly the most spiritual and awe-inspiring moment of my life, and it was shared with everyone there, in body and in spirit. That’s what it’s like to be from Huntington, to be from Marshall. And that’s what this movie needed to achieve.
We Are Marshall starts just as that tragic night did, with a loss to East Carolina. Players, coaches, boosters and “voice of the Thundering Herd” Gene Morehouse got on the plane. Assistant coach Red Dawson (Matthew Fox) gave up his seat to a recruiter trying to get home to his granddaughter’s piano recital and took the recruiting trip himself. The cheerleaders, including one Annie Cantrell (Kate Mara), who was engaged to one of the players, had to drive home. Defensive back Nate Ruffin (Anthony Mackie) was injured and had stayed home. He went to see a movie that night. And then the announcements came, over the news, over the radio, by phone and even in the movie theater: there had been a plane crash. All 75 passengers perished. It was November 14, 1970.
It’s hard to imagine such a devastating loss. These were not only your team’s football players. They were your students, your friends, your sons. The entire town was broken, and it would’ve been completely reasonable and understandable to shut down the program in remembrance of all that was lost. People felt guilt over living, responsibility to honor the fallen, and an honest hesitation over whether or not football would ever feel right again. But if you love something, it can heal you. And that’s what football did for Marshall.
Not right away, of course. They had to start completely over, from the ground up. You see it played for comedy in movies all the time, a team having to assemble a rag-tag assortment of players from wherever they can find them, but Marshall had to do that for real. Jack Lengyel (Matthew McConaughey) came over from Wooster to be the head coach (proving to be almost exactly what they needed by being sociable but not mournful and sort of colloquially single-minded, able to tell people what they needed to hear in the way they needed to hear it, and able to bring them around to his way of thinking). Red came back to be his assistant, but only for a year, to help with the transition. (His tearful “How am l supposed to look a mother in the eye and promise her anything ever again?” gets me right in the gut, and his breakdown after the Xavier game leaves me spent.) University president Dedmon (David Strathairn) petitioned the NCAA to allow them to play freshmen. And they recruited from other Marshall athletes — basketball players, baseball players, soccer players, whatever they could find. And they fielded a team. It wasn’t easy, and it didn’t fix them right away — in fact, their first loss of the 1971 season led to all those same doubts again, but amplified. But eventually it was cathartic. Eventually they won. And though they lost more games in the 1970s than any other program, eventually they became one of the most successful, winning two national championships in Division 1-AA, before fielding names like Pennington and Randy Moss, and winning almost every MAC championship they appeared in. They rose from those ashes, and even though a lot of the people at Marshall University weren’t even close to being around when that plane crashed, the memory of that tragedy is still with them, and it holds them together, and they still rise.
Director McG had sort of an impossible task ahead of him when he took on this film, because how could anyone outside this community understand it? He could handle the actual game play — his history of music videos and action movies kind of cemented that, and in fact he films movie football possibly better than I’ve ever seen it filmed (right there in the action, but not choppy or hard to follow — really smooth and intense and present). But there’s so much more to the film, and to the heart of the story, than football. Miraculously, and wonderfully, he understands that. And he conveys that heart, that community, that loss and that catharsis and that coming together. When Jack walks out of his house the morning of the Xavier game and sees the entire town heading toward the stadium, that’s exactly how it still feels today. He captured the true essence of those people.
Anthony Mackie, too, is magnificent as Ruffin. If you’re not a fan of him, I just don’t know what you’re doing with your life. Ruffin’s pained, tearful, gritty determination to play through the injury in his shoulder because he feels beholden to his fallen teammates is as devastating as it is inspiring. You’ve known all along why he’s fought for this team and for this game, but he gives it dimension in that moment, and makes it a thing you could almost reach out and touch.
The thing about death and loss is that no matter what you do, life continues on. Eventually you have to take the next step, go to the next place, drink that beer you bought. A son can lose his father but keep him too, by growing up to be the voice of the Thundering Herd himself, as Gene’s son Keith did. A man can lose 33 of the 42 games he coaches and still be a winner because he put a team on the field. The point is to do what you love, what you need to do, and to just keep doing it despite the losses and the heart aches and the setbacks. Life goes on, and so must we. We are Marshall.
Viable Option 