We Are Marshall was on HBO again tonight. I had seen it only for the first time about a week ago, also on HBO, and was left feeling like it was lacking something. At a recent family birthday party, I asked my father if he had seen it. He had and he liked it. On certain genres of movies, our tastes don’t always agree while on others we see eye-to-eye. In general, he tends to overlook a movie’s shortcomings if it pulls on the heartstrings where I lend less weight to the sentiments if I don’t understand the logic of the decisions.

For example, I’ll never understand Serendipity. It just didn’t make sense to me. I just couldn’t swallow that two people who hit it off so well and felt so strongly for one another would act so ridiculously. Kate Beckinsale, who has wow factor, stars as Sara who meets Jonathan, played by a harmless John Cusack, while out Christmas shopping in New York. The two hit it off immediately, seem to fall in love, and then for reasons that aren’t clear to me, throw up their hands and turn it over to “fate.” They write their phone numbers down but instead of exchanging them, they just throw them away. Ok, well maybe they didn’t actually throw them away, but they may as well have. She writes hers in a book and gives it away, and he writes his on a $5 bill that she spends on some candy. Oh, come on! Who does that? I might be willing to concede that somewhere, sometime there were two people who could have been this flighty, but if there were, I’m sure they didn’t act as pithy and seemingly together as the two characters that had been introduced in the beginning of this movie.

To me, the movie plays out like the old joke about the sailor whose boat is sinking so he prays to God for help. When a boat comes by to offer the man a lift, he refuses and instead insists that God will save him.  The boat leaves but the sailor continues to sink. Another boat comes by to offer the man a lift, and he again refuses insisting that God will answer his prayers and save him.  However, the boat leaves and the craft takes on more water until a third boat comes by and offers to take the sailor aboard but he again refuses. Finally, the boat sinks and the sailor dies only to find himself standing in heaven before the Almighty. The sailor drops to his knees and begs the Lord to know what he had done to forsaken Him and why He let him drown. God pauses a moment and then asks, “What about the three boats I sent?”

Even in the frame of the movie, this “serendipitous” decision to let fate decide if the two are meant to be is shown to be an absurd move. Although the phone numbers eventually work themselves into each other’s hands, so much time has gone by in the interim, including marriages to other people, that it can hardly be viewed as a raging success.  I don’t know if he does or not, but I’d be willing to bet my dad liked Serendipity.

None of this is to say that I thought We Are Marshall was as poor as I thought Serendipity was, but I thought they missed the boat with a lot of things. The story is of the true Marshall University football team who was nearly wiped out along with all its coaching staff in a horrific 1970 plane crash. In the film version of events, the real attention grabber was coach Jack Lengyel, played by a cartoonish Matthew McConaughey who evokes a faint glimpse into how he must have looked to the police the night of his infamous bongo playing arrest in October of 1999. Lengyel is a great coach and humanitarian who helped rebuild the Marshall University football team but he was only one player in a story rich with notable characters.

William “Red” Dawson, who was a recruiting coach for the team and had not been aboard the plane while out on a recruiting trip, is viewed as an important figure in both real life and in the film version by being given to the able Matthew Fox from Lost. However, there are just too few scenes or lines of dialog for Red to come across as anything more than a periphery character. Likewise for Marshall University President Donald Dedmon, who had successfully petitioning the NCAA to allow the Marshall frehsman players to take the field. Dedmon is well played by brilliantly by David Strathairn. Although Strathairn has more film to work with than Fox, he isn’t given the dialog he deserves and the film misses a perfect opportunity for his character to plead his case to the NCAA, which would succinctly underline the whole moral of the story and why it was important for the team to take the field to pay respect to their deceased teammates, friends, family, and neighbors.

I think opportunities were also missed by not better profiling more of the returning football players who were suddenly expected to, for lack of a less obvious term, pick up the ball and run with it. After the crash, the team’s surviving kicker, Tom Bogdan, hung up his cleats and never played football again, too overcome with guilt for not having been with the team on the trip. In the film, Bogdan is played by Brian Geraghty, who looks like Wes Bentley from American Beauty with about 25 pounds on his frame - something about the eyes, but the portrayal feels hollow with only scenes of Geraghty brooding and none of him appearing to cope with real emotion.

Reggie Oliver was a Marshall University freshman quarterback who was suddenly one of the teams veterans and the new starting quarterback. It was Oliver who orchestrated the team’s first win of the season on a pass to Terry Gardner. After Marshall, Oliver went on to play professional football in the WFL before going on to coaching. However, although Arlen Escarpeta appears to get more screen time as Oliver than even Fox does as Red, I somehow never felt connected to him either or that he had any struggles fitting into his new position both on and off the field.

Blake Smith‘s sport was soccer and basketball before finding himself in the position as the new kicker for the football team. Even Kathy Ireland was given more to work with during her portrayal of a soccer-player-turned-kicker in the comedy Unnecessary Roughness than was affored to Smith in We Are Marshall. Smith’s life is reduced to only a brief clip in which he gets his shot on the team after a coach sees him kick a ball out of the soccer field. The actor who portays Smith is Billy Bennett who, according to IMDB, doesn’t have any other credited roles as of yet.

It’s not just the portrayals of the team and administration that I thought were lacking, but those of the rest of the community as well. I never really believed that this was a community that was dealing with a loss, much less one as tragic as this. Ian McShane, who may be most known for playing Swearengen in HBO’s Deadwood, plays Paul Griffen, a composite of the grieving parents. McShane is a master at expressing deep emotion through intonationg and expression, but even he comes through as a two-dimensional character stuck on the third stage of loss, anger.

Maybe in a strange way it could be considered fitting that a movie about the calamity that struck Marshall University on November 14, 1970 ended as it did, full of promise, much of it left unrealized. I just can’t help wonder if the community that lost so much didn’t deserve a better shot at getting something back this time around.

"I think a hero is an ordinary individual who finds strength to persevere and endure in spite of overwhelming obstacles.”
Christopher Reeve