MovieChat Forums > Hoosiers (1987) Discussion > Kind of a sad movie

Kind of a sad movie

posted 13 years ago by narnia4
4 replies | jump to latest

Usually this movie is looked at as an "uplifting drama", and it is. But I think there's a melancholy feel to it that pervades the entire film and is often overlooked. A few examples.

1. The people of Hickory are largely shallow, close-minded jerks and they don't necessarily ever change. There are certainly good points to them as well, like a sense of community that brings them together to support the team. But they didn't like Coach Dale from the start and they obviously only accepted him for selfish reasons. The only way they would have kept him there is if the team kept winning. We only really see Coach Dale grow on a small number of people there, for most of them he's a tool to be used instead of a part of the community. And this remains pretty obvious throughout the movie. Nothing against the "small town mentality" personally, but the pluses and minuses of it were well-handled imo.

2. Connected to example #1 in many ways, but the Coach Dale/Myra relationship was doomed from the start. Last time I watched I checked out the special features and the deleted scenes made this pretty clear. Myra tells him that he "showed her something" and gave her the courage to get away from Hickory and go back to graduate school. A very well-acted scene by Hackman, he looks crushed but he accepts it... too bad it had to be cut. So one of the only people that he thinks that he really DID get into a serious relationship with, it appears in the deleted scene that it only went one way.

3. The same "trap" that Myra was trapped in was now Coach Dale's trap. I don't recall if its ever made clear that he's returning for another year, but he was presumably an ambitious man at one point. And as pointed out, now he really does have nowhere else to go (as someone pointed out in the film). And most of the people there want to use him, he has nobody, his relationship with Myra is doomed to be only friendship. Yeah, depressing stuff.

4. So with the other three points in mind, the victory in the end rings just a little hollow. As Hershey's character pointed out more than once in the movie, it is just a game, right? Its a really good score, uplifting yes but there does seem to be a bit of melancholy to it as well.

I do think that the movie ends more uplifting than not. While most of the town didn't seem to understand him, I think the "uplifting" part and basically the point of the whole movie is that it WAS more than "just a game" and that Coach Dale ended up being more than a coach to the players who ended up being just about the only people to stick with him all the way through.

So this board doesn't seem to be the most active, but any thoughts on this? This overlooked aspect (its overlooked in other sports movies as well, like Rocky... granted it ends well but the entire movie up to that point is pretty darn depressing) makes me like it a lot more than I would just a cheesy uplifting drama.

[–] hoosiersfan2011 13 years ago

Good points. I agree that screenwriter Angelo Pizzo made the right decision by including some pretty heavy plot points. He decided that having the characters overcome personal obstacles and develop relationships was the true heart of the movie, not basketball. When he was writing, he kept reminding himself that "this is not a sports movie." These plot points are sad but not overwhelmingly so, perhaps because we see the characters figuring out how to deal with their difficulties.

1. Coach Dale did need to prove himself to the townspeople through basketball victories. When basketball season was over, perhaps then the townspeople were ready to view him more as a regular person and not just a coach.

2. The deleted Norman/Myra scene doesn't necessarily imply that they're breaking up. When Myra asks Norman if he will come visit her, it's not clear whether she views them as being in a relationship or just friends. I agree that Norman's reaction upon hearing that she's leaving seems to indicate that he probably feels more for her than she does for him. That makes sense, because he's the one who pursued her.

3. The movie never says whether Norman decides to stay in Hickory. After guiding his team to the state title after only one season as their coach, he most likely would have had more career options.

4. I think the state-finals victory in the movie does a good job of representing just how important basketball was and is to the people of Indiana. It really is comparable to a religion. For a small town especially, having a state-champion team makes the entire town feel important. It's something the residents never forget. Consider Indiana's 1954 Milan Indians team, which served as inspiration for Hoosiers. That victory, now 58 years in the past, is still celebrated with a museum and special events and is still written about in books and articles.

[–] mobocracy 9 years ago

I think you're right, the town seems to be portrayed as kind of bleak place. The landscape shots have kind of a winter bleakness about them -- gray skies, dead plants or empty fields.

The town looks kind of haggard and worn, too, but I think that's kind of quirk of a low budget movie filming on location to get a small town vibe but lacking the budget to make the town look aged appropriate for its period -- the town looks like it should have in 1986, not 1951.

[–] hoosiersfan2011 9 years ago

The movie shows how Indiana really looks. The state's winter landscape is even more monochromatic when there is snow on the ground and the sky is overcast. The movie's scenery is quite authentic. The filmmakers made no effort to pretty it up.

[–] rtlh1982 8 years ago

I wondered if I was the only one who found the depiction of small town life rather bleak.