McFarland USA (2015, PG, 2h 9m)

The movie starts out with head coach Jim White giving a halftime speech to his football team. Jim gets mad at a player and grabs a cleat and throws it at the player’s direction. The cleat made incidental contact with the player as the player stormed out of the locker room in dismay. The next scene we see the White family driving to their new house in a small town called McFarland. It is implied that Jay got fired from his job as a football head coach because of the incident with throwing the cleat at one of his players. McFarland seems to be a very run down time with a lot of Spanish speaking people in it. Jim’s kids see their new house for the first time, and it is not to their liking, but Jim tries to reassure them and make the best of the situation. In McFarland Jim will work at the local high school where he will have multiple jobs including gym teacher and assistant football coach. During the first football game Jim gets into a fight with another coach regarding if one of the players was okay enough to play. Eventually the other coach got his way and Jim was no longer an assistant football coach. Jim soon made an observation that a lot of the students can seem to run for miles without getting tired. As a result, Jim pitched the idea to start a school cross country team and the principal eventually gave into the idea. Jim asked one of the students, Johnny, to build a team and he was able to build a team of seven members. At first the team struggled and didn’t perform that well in the meets against other schools. One reason for this was because McFarland didn’t have a lot of locations and diverse places to train for cross country, this was evident when there was a giant hill in one of the meets. The started to get better though eventually and started qualifying for invitational meets. One key struggle of the team was attendance, this was due to multiple members of the team needing to work to be able to support their family. While the team started seeing success the rest of the White family started to become more accustomed to McFarland and started to feel more at home. The team eventually qualified for the state championship meet and the boys as well as Jim were ecstatic, at this point the whole town of McFarland was supporting this team. The team had also become a close-knit family as the team was the best thing, they each had in their lives. Jim also received praise for what he had accomplished with the team and other schools (much wealthier) were trying to recruit him to work for them. Heading into the state championship meet McFarland was not projected to do well as all other schools in the area continually made fun of them and looked down on them. The race had begun and one member on the team had gotten very nervous and as a result paced the race very poorly. Due to that it seemed the chance had no chance of winning until the anchor of team Danny Diaz who was portrayed as fat and slow throughout the whole movie came out of nowhere and subsequently won the race for the school. Everyone was in utter shock when McFarland was announced the winner, other schools wanted to know Jim’s decision about working for their school and Jim declined their offer so he could stay in McFarland. I personally loved this movie as it shows how a group of misfits and poor people came together so they can all achieve a goal they never knew they wanted prior. This film was also based on true events but made significant changes to the plot for dramatic reasons such as Danny Diaz being fat and slow which was not true in real life.