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Rob Brown
Gary Fleder
The Express
(2008)
His fame having been curtailed by circumstance, college football star Ernie Davis deserves his own Hollywood-sized sports movie, and he gets one in The Express. Davis was the first African-American to win the Heisman Trophy, but his path to success was a difficult one, since he played during the pre-civil rights era of the ‘50s and ‘60s. Gary Fleder’s film locates most of its dramatic tension in whether or not Davis (Rob Brown), can truly trust Syracuse coach Ben Schwartzwalder (a growly Dennis Quaid) to watch his back.
The tale of heroic triumph—inter-personal and psychic—over racism is told with the simplicity of a children’s story and some unfortunate exaggeration (most notably the relocation of of a 1959 game against West Virginia to that team's home turf, where the film insists the team was pelted by bottles and other trash...it's a whole-cloth invention used as shorthand for a racist time). Charles Leavitt's screenplay (based on Robert Gallagher's book Ernie Davis: The Elmira Express) rolls out ever dramatic cliche in its dialogue and incident, as Davis goes from a stuttering ten-year-old victim of racist coal-town bullies (narration: "People would always ask, 'What are you running from?'...I wasn't running from. I was running to") to the star running back of Elmira High School, where he's hand-picked by Schwartzwalder and wooed by Cleveland Browns-bound Syracuse star Jim Brown (Darrin Dewitt Henson).
The relationship between Schwartwalder and Davis was, by all accounts, like that of father and son (Davis' real father was out of the picture), and while this notion certainly isn't lost on The Express, the need for a dramatic arc positions Schwartzwalder early on as a reluctant "realist" admonishing Davis not to think about dating a white girl. The coach teaches, "There are some lines that people don't care to see crossed," a prelude to the fictionalized West Virginia game and the actual racist treatment the team faced while in Dallas for the Cotton Bowl. Quaid earns his paycheck with a climactic halftime speech: "Winning this one means nothing if you lose yourselves."
Fleder seems to be going for a cross of Remember the Titans and Rudy (here's Charles S. Dutton as Davis' beloved grandfather), and the formula essentially works. Those like me, who have seen and enjoyed a large number of "based on a true story" sports films, will probably concede this one is a little dull, despite the bittersweet finish that is the film's raison d'etre (Davis passes the baton to Floyd Little just before...well, did you see Brian's Song?). It's most unfortunate that the stolid but bland Brown (who played football at Amherst College) captures little of the good-humored energy Davis' teammates recall, and the film matches Brown's blandness in its inability to convert the story's basics into flavorful realism. Like a biography plucked from the shelf of a grade-school library, The Express' PG-rated family friendliness includes ample inspiration and sufficient history to get to its destination in "express" fashion.
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