What makes a great movie? One of the key ingredients has to be a scenario with the scope for the audience to feel a wide range of strong emotion. We go to movie theatres to feel something, and often the strength of the best films lies in the fact that they take us on a kind of emotional tour.
We see this approach in classical music as well and, interestingly, the more insightful directors and auteurs will often be more like a composer than we realize. What someone like Steven Spielberg will do is he will focus on the emotional temperature of his art, with the story serving as a vehicle for a series of highs and lows. He’ll work to create range: moments of suspense and then relief, moments of sadness and then moments of happiness. It might seem a slightly backwards approach to making a movie and you might think that instead the characters and events would lead the plot, but the films that really make an impact aren’t designed that way at all.
There are plenty of nice examples in football films. You see, what you get in football is a microcosm of life. Most obviously, there’s the battle of the game itself: the struggle of fighting hard and then the pain of losing or the joy of winning.
Remember the Titans
This movie is a perfect illustration of the point. What you have with this classic football picture from 2000 is an epic story of a sustained effort against the challenges of life. Game scores are more than just numbers here. Just like they will be when you’re keeping track of the NFL scores this season, those all-important figures are in fact representations of human progress, heart and pride.
Denzel Washington here, as Coach Herman Boone is wonderful, and the fact that it’s set in a High School in 1971 is fun too. However, though it might sound like a bold claim, both of these features are actually fairly arbitrary. Whilst a great actor helps and some period detail is enjoyable (…those amusing hairstyles and fashions of the ‘70s), it could equally be led by an unknown actor and set in 1950 or 2000. In fact, the essence of this film and the key to its success has little to do with the particulars and everything to do with the potent emotional journey on which it takes the audience.
Jerry Maguire
All around the game of football itself, there’s scope for a great deal of emotional stimulation too. Just look at Jerry Maguire. Now, this is obviously a football film, but its focus isn’t on the game at all but on what goes on behind the scenes. Tom Cruise won the Academy Award for Best Actor for this 1996 movie, and Cuba Gooding Jr. won Best Supporting Actor, but once again, counter-intuitive though this claim might seem, the success of this film really is not about their performances.
Rather, we’re moved by the protagonist’s moral revelation at the beginning and then devastated at his failure. We’re thrilled by the hope offered by the Dorothy Body (Rene Zellweger) character and then feel such awful pity when she and her adorable son are messed around by Maguire. We are with him one minute and then against him the next, we feel for him and then dislike him. “Emotional rollercoaster” doesn’t begin to cover it!
And, of course, on top of all that there’s the humor injected into this emotional package by the relationship between Maguire and Rodney Tidwell – the only athlete Maguire still represents after he is fired. This humor punctuates the emotional journey of this film from start to finish. It provides comic relief, bringing us back from the darker territory, but it simultaneously intensifies that darkness by providing contrast, so we have this impressive emotional chiaroscuro throughout.
