Larger text
Smaller text
Print
E-mail
'Coach Carter' oversimplifies an inspirational story
Samuel L. Jackson stars in “Coach Carter”
Paramount Pictures
Stars: Samuel L. Jackson, Robert Ri'chard, Ashanti
MPAA rating: PG-13, for violence, sexual content, language, teen partying and some drug material
"Coach Carter" is the true story, so to speak, of the 1998-99 Oilers basketball season at Richmond (Calif.) High School, just north of San Francisco -- a locale in no way clarified by the movie.
Fifty percent of the mostly minority students graduate -- the majority of them girls, we're told. Six percent go to college. Eighty percent are more likely to go to prison than to college.
As a Richmond student from 1973-77, Ken Carter (Samuel L. Jackson) broke Oilers records. When he returned 21 years later as a non-faculty member to coach basketball for a $1,500 stipend, he was greeted with indifference by almost everyone.
In the film he's shown requiring his players, by a contract they and their parents must sign, to maintain a 2.3 grade point average, to sit in the front rows of classes, to wear a tie and business shirt on game days and to eschew trash-talk for gentlemanly play.
Oh, and he calls them Sir (reference "To Sir, With Love") to suggest the respect they should have for themselves and each other.
He turns the team around big time, but at a price. When he padlocks the gym at one point, forbidding practice and forfeiting games, parents, teachers and the school board renew their enmity toward him. As depicted in the movie, they do not want him to impose academic standards over athletic achievement.
And so "Coach Carter" tells a welcome, if very familiar, tale of a righteous man against the world.
The screenplay by Mark Schwahn and John Gatins, directed by Thomas Carter (no relative of the subject), predictably, if laudably, emphasizes the inspirational component of the coach's tactic.
In distilling and oversimplifying, the movie delivers garbled impressions.
It's so eager to have Carter stand alone that it winds up suggesting that most of the media opposes his academic ideals, for which they should be drummed out of journalism. But I sense the film is fudging to strengthen his loner status, so well played by the authoritative Jackson.
The faculty's opposition flat-out mystifies. Or isn't the movie being accurate about them, or maybe Carter's way of relating to them?
I'll give "Coach Carter" this: It's so hell-bent on being PG-13 suitable for high-school-age audiences, who should see it, that it omits the vulgar language that as students they would find inescapable in school and in social situations.
