Orange Crush

Think Floyd: Dennis Quaid (above) as
Coach Ben Schwartzwalder in The Express, below, the real coach at a
1987 Carrier Dome contest.

MICHAEL DAVIS PHOTO

Now that the orange carpet has been
rolled up, the searchlights have moved on to another opening night, and
with some breathing room until the movie’s Oct. 10 multiplex debut,
it’s as good a time as any to tackle The Express—while also
summoning other football-inspired metaphors along the way. Salt City
sports fans of a certain age already have a head start in understanding
Davis’ iconic status at SU: his key role as part of the Orange’s 1959
championship season, his status as the first African-American to win
the Heisman Trophy in 1961, his tragic passing on May 18, 1963, from
leukemia at a too-young 23. Those sports-loving old-timers, however,
are a lot closer to death’s door than the wider, younger demographic
that actually still goes to the bijoux, which means Express
moviemakers have to make Davis’ backstory relevant for today’s ticket
buyers, without succumbing to the pitfalls of easy nostalgia or the
whiff of stale history lessons.

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It’s a good thing for The Express,
but a sad reality for everyone else, that racism in the United States
will always be an evergreen source of emotional conflict, as
presidential hopeful Barack Obama may soon learn come November. The Express plays that race card from the get-go, as SU player Davis (played as an adult by Finding Forrester’s
Rob Brown) endures epithets from Texas Longhorns footballers during a
crucial game. Then the film reels back a decade or so to Uniontown,
Pa., circa 1949 as a 10-year-old Davis (played by Justin Martin) and
his young cousin pick up returnable bottles near some train tracks.
When a pack of teen townies, with claims of turf advantage amid the
derogatory name-calling, give chase, Davis pours on the speed and
easily escapes his pursuers—a hint of things to come. 

The Express chugs through its
pile-on of familiar biopic flourishes, such as Davis and his family
watching Brooklyn Dodger Jackie Robinson on a television broadcast, as
they huddle on a sidewalk outside a department store’s window display
of a TV set. There’s also some minor drama as Ernie’s mom (Aunjanue
Ellis) takes her son to a new life in Elmira, and away from his beloved
grandpop (Charles S. Dutton) in Uniontown, as well as a moment when
Davis realizes that his high school team has run out of jerseys—but his
coach soothes him with the advice, “Don’t worry: The other team won’t
have any trouble recognizing you.” 

The issue of skin color continues as
Davis enters SU’s hallowed halls in 1958. That same topic, however,
always rankled Class of 1956 alum Jim Brown (Darrin Dewitt Henson), a
gifted running back who believes he was denied a Heisman because of his
race. Brown’s bitterness openly spilled into his press interviews while
at SU. “I know my place,” he tells one reporter, “it just may not be
where you like it!”—or in 2008 parlance, Brown is what the GOP’s
Georgia Rep. Lynn Westmoreland would describe as “uppity,” as in his
recent remarks aimed at Obama. 

The movie acknowledges a fractious
relationship between Brown and SU coach Floyd “Ben” Schwartzwalder
(Quaid), with the coach admitting, “I can only control what goes on a
100-yard gridiron.” Yet frequent scouting trips to Elmira convince
Schwartzwalder that Davis could become a sterling Orange asset, so the
coach convinces Brown—who is Davis’ idol and the previous inhabitant of
the 44 jersey—to help recruit the teen athlete. Over a home-cooked meal
in Uniontown, Davis’ granddad asks Brown about SU, specifically,
“What’s it like for people like us?”

If Spike Lee was in the director’s chair, these scenes would have been played for sardonic anger, yet Express
director Gary Fleder opts for a sepia-toned palatability, an
acknowledgment that these events took place long, long ago in a
different place called America. Sometimes the subtlety works. From a
narrative standpoint, not much is made regarding the re-entry of Davis’
mom into his young life and his subsequent relocation to Elmira. Yet
Fleder’s camera lingers on the fragility of actress Ellis’ performance,
in conjunction with Dutton’s understated turn as the grandfather, to
infer that Davis’ mother has also experienced some personal hard times.
It’s an old-school movie flourish that fills in the blanks without the
need to dig deeper.

Fleder’s film resume, which includes glossy thrillers Runaway Jury, Don’t Say a Word and Kiss the Girls,
marks him as a competent craftsman, although his finest hour took place
on television, as he guided Vincent D’Onofrio’s powerhouse turn as a
dying man wedged in a subway mishap in a 1996 episode of Homicide: Life on the Street. Fleder’s biggest obstacle in The Express,
however, is that he has too much yardage to cover in a two-hour time
frame; that’s obvious in regard to key supporting characters who serve
more as narrative devices so that the film can hit certain plot points.
Actress Nicole Beharie gets redshirted as Ernie’s Cornell girlfriend,
while Omar Benson Miller gets a tad more screen time as Ernie’s
gregarious dorm buddy, a chunky-bunkie composite character named Jack
Buckley. Miller receives the movie’s biggest laugh line when his Jack
tells Ernie about the dim prospects of campus canoodling for a black SU
student: “It’s easier to find a Negro polar bear than a Negro coed.”

Instead Fleder and screenwriter Charles Leavitt, the latter working from Robert Gallagher’s 1999 book Ernie Davis: The Elmira Express,
concentrate on the Davis-Schwartzwalder relationship to earn some
emotional touchdowns. In the title role, Rob Brown has the athletic
physique to pass himself off as a realistic footballer for the
hard-core sports fans, as well as the acting chops to make Davis’
wide-eyed innocence both appealing and inspirational to the younger
kids in the audience. 

As Schwartzwalder, Dennis Quaid is
hardly a dead ringer. With only thick glasses and a quasi-crew cut to
pull off the physical illusion, Quaid doesn’t even bother with the sort
of latex prosthetics that transformed Jon Voight as Howard Cosell in Ali or Christopher Plummer’s Mike Wallace in The Insider. Still, Quaid’s movie-star presence (let alone his other gridiron-cinema credentials on Everybody’s All-American and Any Given Sunday)
conveys the necessary larger-than-life qualities for his coach, as he
allows Davis to drag him into the changing landscape of civil rights,
in a movie that occasionally plays like Driving Miss Daisy in shoulder pads. 

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Beyond the film’s emotional core, other elements of The Express
will have their benefactors or detractors. The football montages boast
bone-crunching mayhem, with tackles that take on the cacophony of
cannon fire and teams stampeding the field that sound like galloping
horses, but all the grainy close-ups feel like a typical sports reel on
ESPN. (Fleder might be comparing his footage with the black-and-white
16mm newsreels of rival teams that Schwarzwalder is always watching,
but it’s a stretch.) The movie has already been called on for its
fudging of certain game statistics, while there seems to be some
dramatic license taken when Davis gets blown away by the Deep South’s
images of Jim Crow in full blossom. (In a jacked-up, though juicy,
moment, a West Virginia coach warns Ben, “Too many colored players can
take the team away from you.”) 

Yet the movie’s scrupulous attention to
detail also includes fleeting sideline glimpses of SU’s Saltine Warrior
mascot, ousted in a late-1970s wave of political correctness and
replaced by lovable furball Otto the Orange. (Such details were handled
by the SU Archives’ Roger Springfield, the former Salt City
sportscaster who has declared that The Express “left him
speechless,” and that’s no small feat for those who still recall the
amiable motormouth.) And there’s a sweet scene near the end when Davis
is recruited by Schwartzwalder to convince a new talent named Floyd
Little (played by Chadwick Boseman) to head for the Hill. Fleder
includes a neat aural effect of a train whistling in the distance
during the chat between Davis and Little, a sonic effect that links
with the early scene of young Davis on the run while also ensuring that
the torch is about to be passed to another 44. 

The Express would clearly like to be in that same league of sports-biopics-as-male-tearjerkers, like the Lou Gehrig story in 1942’s The Pride of the Yankees and Gale Sayers’ friendship with the doomed Brian Piccolo in the 1971 TV-movie Brian’s Song.
Yet those movies had a sense of timeliness (both were made a year after
their subjects’ respective passings), while Davis’ eventful story,
which would seem like a match made in Hollywood heaven, now feels like
a time capsule. It’s a crime that Davis’ biography wasn’t filmed 40
years ago, when racial issues were getting bigger play in Tinseltown
(think In the Heat of the Night) and even the character of Jim
Brown could have been played by Brown himself. Using the same math,
that would mean a movie based on Lopez Lomong’s journey, from Lost Boy
of Sudan to Tully track and field star at the 2008 Summer Olympics,
wouldn’t get the OK until 2053. 

Well, better late than never: Ernie Davis finally gets his belated due with The Express
and there will be something to cheer about on Oct. 10 at Syracuse
multiplexes, which should easily lead the country in the film’s
box-office weekend receipts.