Champions - a feel good non-traditional sports movie
"If I can't say the R-word, what do I call them?", "Their Names"
Champions is a 2023 release directed by Bobby Farrelly (of Farrelly brothers fame - There’s Something About Mary, Dumb & Dumber etc). Set in Iowa, Marcus (played by Woody Harrelson) is a brash, hot-headed and bad-tempered minor-league basketball coach. After a physical altercation with his superior coach at a game, he commiserates by gets drunk in a bar and makes the very unwise choice to drive home and ends up hitting a police car. His sentence - 90 days community service coaching a team of basketball players with intellectual disabilities. After meeting the team, known as “The Friends”, and realising the mammoth task he has ahead of him, he hitches a ride home with Johnny, (played by Kevin Ianucci who has Down Syndrome) and is somewhat horrified to discover that Johnny’s sister, Alex (played by Kaitlin Olson) is a previous casual Tinder hook-up. From here Marcus realises he needs to soften, taking a different approach to his coaching, his team, getting to know them, understanding their abilities and embracing their differences.
You definitely don’t need a film degree to work out the narrative arc of this film (or any sports film really) but Champions is very much a different ball game. It is funny, and not at the expense of anybody in the film’s excellent diverse cast. There are some nods to intolerance and ignorance; there’s a scene where Marcus misunderstands that Down syndrome is genetic and not contagious, and he clearly has apprehension of the team, a space that a lot of people occupy in real-world terms. It does this without mocking the team, and it allows for audiences to enjoy a film even if the subject matter could be confrontational. I don’t believe all people are ignorant by choice (some most definitely are), but in today’s world, sometimes even being curious and asking awkwardly phrased questions about disabilities with good intentions is enough to get you cancelled; as well as giving those with diverse abilities space to exist and thrive, there also needs to be space for people who are trying to understand, embrace and adapt themselves to be inclusive, particularly if they have traditionally excluded those with differing abilities. What Champions does is creates well-rounded characters who are given full permission to be themselves and all the nuances of having disabilities. It would have been easy to lean into traditional tropes of disability on screen by having instances of bullying, or really caricatured reductive ignorance (which often I feel like is a thinly veiled attempt to include those negative viewpoints - people with differing disabilities on screen are reduced to ‘look what they can actually do’ and ‘here is the abuse they put up with’) but Champions doesn't lean into this too much - there is a nod to it when the Friends have to go and practice in a local basketball court in a park. But it doesn’t dominate or define the narrative. The central theme of Champions - is exactly that - being a Champion and what that means for different people. Marcus learns that being a champion isn’t always about winning.
Champions is a very heart-warming, sweet, and has raucously funny moments - I wouldn’t say it’s an outright slapstick comedy, but it’s laced with moments of black spicy humour and I really didn’t feel like it was at the expense of anyone, I could be wrong, and it would be great to hear from anyone who felt otherwise. I’ve seen a couple of reviews that have reduced this to ‘another film that shows us why we should view those will disabilities with humanity’, but I honestly don’t agree with this. I think if you’re going into a film like this with a moral signposting view, that’s what you’ll get out of it, but if you accept it for what it is, an ultimately realistic and endearing look at a team of semi-professional sports enthusiasts, then you’ll get so much more out of the characters and their stories. Champions isn’t virtue-signalling here; it’s simply offering a different style of narrative for the traditional sports movie. We’ve still got a long way to go when it comes to representation of disability on-screen, whilst the most prolific representations of disability remain actors without disabilities mimicking and mocking, any film that creates a space for disability inclusive narratives is welcome in my book.
Aside from the aspect of the movie which focuses on disabilities, the cast themselves are excellent - Kaitlin Olson (who I love in Always Sunny) is razor-sharp as Alex, another win for representation of women over the age of 40 in cinema, she’s warm, vulnerable and assertive. Darius (played by Joshua Felder) offers a different narrative with his disability - Joshua in real life has high functioning autism, plays a talented basketball player who has suffered from traumatic brain injury as a result of a drunk driver, which for Marcus presents a very different challenge about being able to right his own wrongs. Woody Harrelson himself - not stretching too far from his tried and tested screen-presence, brings a believable apprehension but also genuine embrace of his team in a role that would have been very easy to become overly sentimental.
The reason I watched this film is recently I heard a good review of it on Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo’s podcast, Kermode and Mayo’s Take - and after what I can only describe as a bit of a car-crash week at work, I wanted something sentimental, funny, a bit silly, but what I got was a bit of a pep-talk, about the always-required human ability of being able to try, being able to get up after being knocked down (the deft use of Chumbawumba’s Tub Thumping is perfect in this movie). Being a champion doesn’t mean winning, being a champion is being the version of yourself that embraces your passion, tries hard even if the odds aren’t in your favour and most importantly - being a champion is embracing your team, your people; it takes a village and all that. Sometimes, in a sea of movies that lean into the bleaker side of human-existence, sometimes it’s nice to just have a movie that is heartwarming, positive and a bit slushy. Champions will no means be inhabiting the top 10 lists of the greatest cinema of all time, but if you want something that is engaging, funny and positive, then I highly recommend it.
Champions is available on Amazon Prime (currently at the time of publishing is £4.99 to rent in the UK)