Item: Black or White.  The first Kevin Costner film we saw recently is a mixed bag.  White lawyer who drinks too much wants to keep his mixed-race granddaughter in his custody.  Her father’s family (the father appears later in the film) wants the child to be raised in the African-American tradition.  There’s a strong if screeching banshee performance by Octavia Spencer, but it’s better than Kostner’s.  Too many stereotypes, racial and otherwise, make this a flawed flick, including the arrogant black lawyer relative defending the kid’s dope-addicted father.  Race relations are bad enough in this country; we don’t need to reaffirm bigoted and non-productive stereotypes.  The actors are too often over-acting too.  C-grade, and not recommended.

Item: McFarland USA.  Does Costner have a monopoly on sports movies?  He plays a coach with anger-management problems in this movie, a role that isn’t too far from the white guy in Black or White, but he morphs into someone more likable here.  The Hispanic kids and their families are great.  I related because I felt a bit nostalgic.  You’ll relate most likely because this is an inspiring story.  It’s the true story of McFarland High’s cross-country coach Jim White as he prepares reluctant Hispanic teens for the first of nine championships.

White, who the local Hispanic community calls Blanco (double meaning, of course, but it becomes just Coach), has to adapt to a new life in McFarland, a small town just south of Delano on U.S. 99 in California between Tulare and Bakersfield.  Tulare isn’t the capital of Tulare County, by the way; Visalia, the home of the College of Sequoias, mentioned at the end of the film (several of the runners ended up there), is the county seat, but that entire stretch of San Joaquin Valley is the richest agribusiness zone in the country.  I remember McFarland as a dry and hot in the summer (a desert but for irrigation, as is most of agricultural California).  One of my summer jobs as a high school kid was nearby, leading a surveying crew (fields have to be graded because of the irrigation, but that meant pounding stakes in 120+ F degrees and lugging the civil engineer’s equipment—salt pills were required when I returned home)—light work compared to crop-picking, though.

If this were fiction, people might think the story is unreal and/or sappy (Clancy sagely said once that the problem with fiction is that it must seem real).  It isn’t fiction, though, so, whether it seems real or not, it is.  White (played by Kevin Costner) and his family have to adapt to a new way of life.  Highlights are the eating scene at the enchilada dinner; the training on the mounds of almond husks (it’s pretty flat around those parts, the Coastal Range to the west and the Sierra Nevada to the east); the team’s plunge into the Pacific Ocean they’d never seen before; and the quinceañera fiesta, where White celebrates his daughter’s fifteenth birthday (the Hispanic version of a sweet-sixteen affair).  The Hispanic workers’ families have to adapt to the Whites too, but the latter more than meet them halfway in the end—Hispanic family-oriented culture is very compelling.  Some people won’t like this movie for political and bigoted reasons; most will find it a feel-good movie that’s much better than Black or White.  Grade of B+, and definitely recommended.

And so it goes….

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