Sport as Utopia
When it comes to sorting out movie genres, we need to be both more flexible and less flexible than the usual categories allow. More flexible, because labels like ‘thriller’, ‘fantasy’ or ‘adventure’ specify very little beyond a very vague, general subject matter, setting and tone. To properly classify any given film, we often have to think about a particular cycle or subgenre that gave rise to it, the elements from other genres with which it crossbreeds, and the types of confusions it has caused in viewers and reviewers who couldn’t figure out exactly how to label it. (What is the genre of Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941), for example? It fits at least half a dozen niches.)
Less flexible, because sometimes all this microscopic hairsplitting of labels and categories obscures something big and obvious, something that is shared across many different kinds of films. That is the case with something we could call the ‘team movie’, which is the large basket within which I’d gladly place Boaz Yakin’s Remember the Titans (2000).
There are many kinds of teams in popular cinema: sports teams, military units, dance troupes (to name just three). Whether we are – in conventional genre terms – in a sports film, a war drama or a musical, the same, basic issues recur: leadership, group dynamics, the friction of differing values and personalities, the external influence of larger social and political forces, and the resolution of all conflict within the coordinated action of playing, fighting, or dancing and singing.
In fact, itself regularly insists on the cross-generic nature of its central themes. This begins with the music on the soundtrack: sports anthems scored for brass bands are often indistinguishable from military marches; and once the lines of cheerleaders add their youthful choreography, it also turns into a teen musical for a few moments. As well, the device of
