Last night, Undefeated won the oscar for best documentary. Luckily, I saw it Saturday, and all so I can tell you it should NOT have won…well, maybe not so luckily then…
What Works: Judging the film solely on its own merits, it’s a pretty good sports doc about a high school football team in a seemingly all black inner city Memphis school. The kids themselves are interesting and heartbreaking as they struggle with their home life, school work, and dreams of making it to play football in college. One is after a scholarship and another is all but ruined by an explosively short-fuse and—-and what the fuck am I still doing talking about them when I could be talking about Bill Courtney, the white coach of the team who pushes his way into being not just the film’s lead, but also it’s everything…
What Doesn’t Work:…Courtney practically monopolizes the film and I got tired of his constant speechifying and lecturing. I’m not saying he isn’t doing a good thing by coaching the team, but there’s something a little narcissistic about it too, injecting himself into just about every scene so that it’s his scene, whether he has a real solution to a problem or not. I felt the filmmakers, and it’s worth noting that almost all of them are white, could have done a better job of mixing time between Courtney and the players, letting them tell more of their own stories. Surely, at least a couple of the players would have been willing to talk to them without Courtney’s looming presence, but we too-rarely get to hear their stories in their own words. And I can’t believe such a slight sports doc with NO plan for the future of this school, this team, or even this football program—-Courtney takes a job at a better white school after “his boys” make the playoffs—-won out over Paradise Lost 3 which got three wrongfully convicted men freed.
What I Would Have Done Differently: Gotten more players to talk candidly to the camera or, if they did, include more of that footage. Letting Courtney monopolize this film is the equivalent of letting Emma Stone be the star of The Help. You can feel the filmmakers letting subjective bias cloud their judgment by not calling out Courtney for staying with the team while a promising group of players he’d been watching since middle school were there only to leave them the year after they made the playoffs and he could go to a different school.