THE EXPRESS (2008) - ***

While he hasn't held the NFL All-Time Rushing title the 1980s, Jim Brown is still arguably the greatest football running back ever, if not at least still the most iconic. While other Pro Football Hall of Famers like Barry Sanders, Walter Payton, and future enshrinees like current-champion Emmitt Smith have passed Brown by in the record books, Brown is still the legendary high-water mark for that position. To quote Ric Flair, "to be the man, you gotta beat the man!" In that case, unless I'm mistaken, Curtis Martin said that his greatest career moment was surpassing Brown...not Eric Dickerson or Tony Dorsett or Franco Harris. To be quite fair, they were great and all, but none of them kicked ass in THE DIRTY DOZEN.

Anyway, THE EXPRESS reminds us that Brown didn't win the Heisman Trophy, believe it or not. In 1956, the prize went to "The Golden Boy" Paul Hornung of Notre Dame. Hell, Brown of Syracuse University was 5th in the voting! Mind you, Hornung was a terrific Hall of Fame versatile player in college and for the Green Bay Packers, but to say that he was better than Brown is like saying that Sarah Palin is a better candidate than Hillary Clinton. So if the great Jim Brown couldn't win the Heisman at such a racist time within American sports, what black athlete had a chance?

I've had a problem with most recent sports dramas produced about the American Civil Rights struggles from REMEMBER THE TITANS to GLORY ROAD in how simplistic and naively cartoonish they portray the overt racism of those times, as if it only happened down in the South and we quit afterwards. Then I see this recent flier from a Republican Party-affiliated group, and well...



I won't say that THE EXPRESS is a great example, or even a good one I guess, but as a drama I give it props for trying to express (pun!) how racism wasn't simply some ignorant opinions held by dumb hicks back in the woods, but simply based off widely-held racial assumptions about held by white people at that epoch. You know such nonsense that Blacks, err I mean Negroes, lacked the mental capacity compared to whites, are rather lazy and lack discipline without Caucasian supervision, want to steal and ravish everything, etc. Syracuse University football head coach Ben Schwartzwalder (Dennis Quaid) as seen in the film isn't necessarily a bad man or a Nazi racist, but still berates young recruit Ernie Davis (Rob Brown) for supposedly having an "eye" for the white women on campus.

I mean some of you may remember my infamous review of William Friedkin's CRUISING, where in my original draft, I thought I was being progressive and fair, until the gay users of the AD Forums (rightly) berated me for my goddamn ignorance. I still hold the opinion that CRUISING has some artistic merit to it, but yeah I do realize now that the sexual politics in it are rather insultingly stupid. Like Quaid in THE EXPRESS, I learned that I was wrong by talking to that demographic, and hopefully matured with my attitudes. Perhaps also in a few decades (hopefully), Hollywood will show our descendents how that around the turn of the millennium, some rational and logical folks seriously thought that homosexual teachers and scoutmaster were an inherent danger around children, and not priests. (Sorry, I couldn't resist that one.)

Anyway, Davis was the first black to win the Heisman Trophy, helped lead the Syracuse Orangemen to it's sole National Championship in 1959, picked #1 in the NFL Draft, but died of Leukemia at the age of 23 before ever playing a down. His #45 jersey was subsequently retired by the Cleveland Browns. As a film, THE EXPRESS has more than anything else a good true story to work with but packages a very conventional and uninspired narrative around it. Then again, what would you expect from a bland director like Gary Fleder (RUNAWAY JURY)?

That said, there was some touches I liked, enough to muster this material into watchable territory. I enjoyed how Davis as a boy being inspired by Jackie Robinson, and then being recruited by Brown, who as a mentor gives advice using lacrosse as a analogy (Fun Fact: Brown is in the National Lacrosse Hall of Fame), and would return at a key scene. This nice cyclical script device bookends when a dying Davis himself passes off his knowledge to Denver Broncos star Floyd Little, and die as a hero for eternity not just for breaking racial barriers, but also for his struggle against cancer.

If anything, I think my main criticism against THE EXPRESS is that it spends most of its emotional muster on the racism, and gives skimp time to his illness. As a bird, flying so high, more than what anyone else expected or hoped for, it's like he had to die as a result. If one wants to be pretentious enough to see it, there is a Jesus Christ analogy to this tale, what with the throwaround shots of Davis bleeding profusely. Then again, maybe the filmmakers simply didn't want BRIAN'S SONG 2. I guess I could also slack the movie for it's flat linear structure, but that's a problem with most biopics in general.

I do though must make a point of how apparently the whole sequence where Davis is acousted by a violent prejudist crowd in West Virginia did happen, but at a Syracuse home game in New York. Look, as a white southerner I won't lie or accuse away that we were awful (and none of that "Heritage, Not Hate" bullshit), but damn I hate when Hollywood won't admit that such racism wasn't relegated to the South. I mean give me a break, be honest about it.

Still, I liked THE EXPRESS. It's nothing more than decent, a TV picture that somehow escaped into theatres, and for better or for worse was exactly what I expected. Brown is good, and Quaid continues my belief that he's a tremendously underused acting tool at the movies. But during that screening, it came to mind that to our national mythology, the black pioneers were not intellectuals like W.E.B. Du Bois but iron men of physicality like Jesse Owens, Robinson, Brown, and Davis who had to unfortunately earn grudging respect from their white overlords before that ethnicity could even begin to gain traction in the cerebral field of society.

Then a few decades later, we as a nation be possibly a few weeks away from electing our first African-American Commander-in-Chief.