Invincible
Directed by Ericson Core
There once was a time when sports movies centered on famous men whose bravery and heroism were held up as a model for all to emulate. Gary Cooper was Lou Gehrig, the great first baseman who called himself “the luckiest man on the face of the earth” even though he was dying young, in The Pride of the Yankees. Pat O’Brien inspired a selfish band of boys to ascend to lofty heights as he told the Notre Dame football team to “win just one for the Gipper” in Knute Rockne: All American. Burt Lancaster showed how the greatest track-and-field man in America overcame anti-Indian prejudice in Jim Thorpe: All American. William Bendix limned a Baltimore foundling’s rise to greatness in The Babe Ruth Story.
These days, however, professional athletes comprise a subset of celebrity that ranks somewhere between John Mark Karr and a porn star. Will anyone ever make a movie called The Barry Bonds Story? Will the race between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa to overtake Babe Ruth’s single-season home-run record be turned into heartbreaking fare to rival the HBO tearjerker 61* about Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris?
With present-day sports stars seemingly more prone to villainy than heroism, Hollywood has been forced to look elsewhere in its quest to portray real-world athletic triumphs. The new-order sports movie is about an ordinary person who defies all odds and the low expectations of his friends and family to do something extraordinary. The first of these was Rudy, the 1993 tale of Notre Dame benchwarmer Rudy Ruettiger and his determination to play football for the Fighting Irish. Everyone scoffs–“you’re 5 feet nothing, 100 and nothing,” says one friend–but Rudy perseveres and ends up sacking the quarterback during the one down he is allowed on the field. He is carried off the field by his fellow players.
Rudy was not a big hit, but it has become a phenomenon on cable television, where it plays constantly to an audience of eager boys who are willing to watch it dozens of times. Its influence can be seen in the triptych of sports movies released by Disney in the past four years. In The Rookie, Dennis Quaid plays Jim Morris, the Texas high-school baseball coach who discovered in his mid-30s that he could throw a baseball faster than he did as a kid and managed to get himself hired by the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. Miracle tells the story of the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team, that ingathering of outmatched Americans who defeated the top-ranked Soviets.
And now we have the best of all, Invincible, in which a part-time Philadelphia schoolteacher and bartender named Vince Papale suddenly finds himself vying for a job on his beloved Philadelphia Eagles football team in the desperate summer and fall of 1976. Invincible was directed by its cinematographer, Ericson Core, and it’s one of the most visually striking American films in recent years–beautiful and seedy and grimy all at the same time. It’s worth seeing alone for the evocation of Philadelphia in the years of its financial and industrial collapse (and for its hilarious reminder of the kinds of facial hair and suits men felt compelled to wear during those years).
Even though Invincible is a sports fan’s fantasy come to life, the Vince Papale we see here (played by a very subdued Mark Wahlberg) isn’t living a dream. He is fighting for his life. Out of work, abandoned by a wife who tells him he will never amount to anything, unable to pay his phone bill, Vince is a 30-year-old man at a dead end. He doesn’t take all that seriously the news that newly hired Eagles coach Dick Vermeil (Greg Kinnear) is having open tryouts. His friends insist he go, and he does go, and he’s invited to training camp, and he isn’t cut the first day or the second. He never expects to stick around, but he has nothing else to do and nothing left to wish for.
Director Core and screenwriter Brad Gann have drenched their tale in a melancholy that might not actually have been present in Papale’s actual story. It’s true he was a 30-year-old man who never even played college ball, but before Papale tried out for the Eagles he had played a season for Philadelphia’s team in the short-lived World Football League. He was already a minor pro player, not simply a schlep off the street.
But even if they have magnified Papale’s difficulties (and added a romance with a woman the real Papale wouldn’t even meet for another decade), Core and Gann have made an inspired dramatic choice by playing his story on the downbeat. Vince is going through the same struggle as every working-class man in Philadelphia, and as the movie progresses his father and his friends are forced onto a picket line against Westinghouse–a sure precursor to the closure of the company’s plants and the loss of those jobs forever.
Unlike his friends and family, Vince finds himself in a position to transcend his circumstances and do something great. His pursuit of a sports career is ennobling. He’s not in it for the bling, but to challenge himself to scale new heights and, as he does so, to give hope and glory to his tormented friends and his blasted city. No wonder moviegoers are responding so enthusiastically to Invincible. It is a deeply moving reminder that professional sports can be more than just ‘roids and rape.
John Podhoretz, a columnist for the New York Post, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.
