Remember the Titans

“This is no democracy. It is a dictatorship. I am the law.”

Denzel Washington can do no wrong. He’s handsome, smart, emotionally controlled, thoughtful, and he’s got a memorable gait. His screen characters are always the kind of men who are ahead of everyone else, if only others would get with the program and follow. He can play second fiddle, true, but his gravitas has increased with age, so he’s best used in the center of anything he does because everything moves more smoothly around him.

Importantly, this Denzel-type is able to stretch from evildoer to hero; he’s won Oscars for playing along either extreme. In the main, though, Washington plays the admirable good guy, particularly when he’s called to play at some important crossroads of history, which is the case in Boaz Yakin’s sentimental biopic Remember the Titans (2000).

Re-telling a true story of integration in the early post-Civil Rights era of 1971, Remember the Titans reduces this fraught topic to the microcosm of a high school football team. Importantly, the newly desegregated team, accomplished through force, is led by a newly hired Black man, Herman Boone (Washington), an outsider who faces all manner of resistance due to his methods, his person, his standards, and his ability to succeed beyond the skeptical regard of his new community in Alexandria, Virginia. SPOILER ALERT. The Titans win and win and win, and it’s all due to Boone who inspires his student athletes to work together as he similarly learns to trust his key subordinate, the White kids’ former head coach, Bill Yoast (Will Patton).

The supporting cast includes several now-famous performers like Ryan Gosling, Donald Faison, and Hayden Panettiere. Yet the movie’s emotional resonance, achieved for this viewer despite seeing how manipulated the feelings in the story world are, rests on Washington’s wholesomeness in the performance of Boone.

There are a few unfortunate excesses in the film. In one instance, Boone takes his team on a pre-dawn run through the Gettysburg cemetery, so they can listen to him pontificate on the subject of how a divided house will fall. There is also a secondary buddy story about the White kids’ leader and the Black kids’ leader setting aside their mutual hatred to become best friends, which is barely plausible on-screen, even if the facts are drawn from real-world experience.

As a Disney production under the aegis of Jerry Bruckheimer, Remember the Titans was made for the small-ish budget of $30 million, a lower-than-average amount for feature films of the moment. That the bet returned more than four times the investment from ticket sales is a fact, but we must credit the folks at Walt Disney Records for diversifying their investment and producing an on-the-nose soundtrack album of hits, such as the anthem “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” by Ashford & Simpson.

–September 30, 2018

The real Herman Boone.

"These are the words I said to you," sayeth the Curator, Garrett Chaffin-Quiray