Men Of Honor, Remember The Titans

By EWAN McDONALD

Men Of Honor

(Herald rating: * * * )

Running time: 128 mins

Remember The Titans

(Herald rating: * * * )

Running time: 113 mins

Rental: Today

America's long, hard, unresolved battle with civil rights features in both big videos out this week: one based on fact, the other a fiction, and while neither is In The Heat Of The Night, they ain't as bad as you might fear.

The first has a twist: a military history for which Hollywood couldn't get too many of the facts twisted because it involves American against American. It's the biopic of Carl Brashear, a black sharecropper's son who left school and signed up for the Navy after the Second World War.

By this time President Harry Truman had integrated the services, but the Navy was slow to change and blacks had the choice of becoming cooks or officers' valets (has much changed? Look at The West Wing).

Brashear (played with superlative dignity by Cuba Gooding jun) wanted to be a diver, and did so successfully, then fought another battle to return to active duty after losing a part of a leg in an accident on board his ship.

Brashear's life intersects with Master Chief Billy Sunday (Robert De Niro), a redneck who at first hates Brashear but gradually changes his mind. Sunday is implacably opposed to the idea of a black Navy diver, but he is also a diver and comes to respect another man who can do it well.

He also comes from a poor farming background and his alcoholism is damaging his marriage to Gwen (Charlize Theron). The woman in Brashear's life is Jo (Aunjanue Ellis), a Harlem librarian who tutors him in reading when he has trouble with written exams.
Sunday is not Brashear's biggest problem, however. That's "Mister Pappy" (Hal Holbrook), the commanding officer who may be the first cousin to Humphrey Bogart's Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny.

And then there are the other trainees who refuse to share a dorm with Brashear, metaphors for the racism which permeated American — and certain other British-descended countries — in the 40s and 50s.

Remember The Titans is pretty much a formula football movie with a story about racial harmony tacked on.

Denzel Washington and Will Patton are two football coaches — one black, one white. Their lives are teamed up when, in 1971, a high school in Virginia is integrated and the school board brings in Coach Boone (Washington) as the new head coach. The former Coach Yoast (Patton) is expected to become his assistant.

Neither is happy. Yoast does not want to be demoted by affirmative action, positive discrimination, or whatever. Boone lost his job in North Carolina and says he can't do that to another man.

But Alexandria's black residents gather on Boone's lawn to cheer for the first black coach at the newly integrated high school, so Boone realises he has a responsibility.

Yoast's white players say they won't play for a black coach but Yoast doesn't want them to lose college scholarships, so he swallows his pride and agrees to be Boone's assistant, leading the whites back to practice.

Said to be based on a true story, this is more a football movie than a social history and so, yes, everything is settled by the last play in the last seconds of the championship game.

As an American critic said, "On the soundtrack we hear lyrics like 'I've seen fire and I've seen rain' and 'Ain't no mountain high enough,' but not other lyrics that must also have been heard in Alexandria in 1971, like 'We shall overcome'." And certainly not A Change Is Gonna Come.