Too Much of a Gooding
What a new feel-good sports movie called Radio contrives to move us is just fine — that’s what feel-good sports movies are supposed to do. That its makers choose to move us in the style of a linebacker sacking a quarterback is not so good. After enduring this flagrant emotional blitz, you may feel like throwing a penalty flag.
Adapted from Gary Smith’s leaner, subtler and more thoughtful 1996 Sports Illustrated story, the movie version of Radio reduces to cartoonish hash the true story of a lonely retarded man and the extraordinary effects he had on a high school football team, its coach and the residents of a small Southern town. James Robert Kennedy, whom everyone in Anderson, South Carolina, still calls “Radio” because of the transistor radio he always pressed to his ear, is here portrayed by Cuba Gooding Jr. as a sweet-tempered outsider who slowly emerges from terrified muteness to become Hanna High School’s most enthusiastic cheerleader, its team manager and, in his own mind at least, coach, quarterback and pep-band conductor. Once the usual bullies and doubters are won over, Radio becomes the soul of the team (and, a bit unbelievably, of the town), and Gooding, armed with a full repertoire of facial tics, shy grins and uncertain foot shuffles, brings him to life with showy, scenery-munching enthusiasm.
Director Mike Tollin (Summer Catch) and screenwriter Mike Rich (The Rookie) can’t resist bashing us over the head with goodness and warmth. This is Remember the Titans on steroids. Ed Harris seems uncharacteristically inert as coach Harold Jones, a small-town Bear Bryant with a feeling for the vulnerability of others. Harris’ deep-blue eyes convey a vacant dreaminess here, as if he’s thinking about something else (maybe his next movie). Bulldozed by Gooding’s audience-appeal antics, the star of Apollo 13 and Pollock simply recedes. Even scenes in which the coach confronts a disapproving booster (Chris Mulkey), tries to console his neglected teenage daughter (Sarah Drew) or disciplines a wayward player (Riley Smith) feel detached and halfhearted.
Smith’s original story, called “Someone to Lean On,” goes easy on the schmaltz while painting a sublimely nuanced portrait of its mentally disabled hero. But Tollin and Rich reschedule the death of Radio’s devoted mother to suit their purposes, and they have Jones bravely resign his post as head football coach to underscore his selflessness, though the real Jones did no such thing. Some of this you write off as poetic license; the rest you can’t help seeing as formula-fulfillment.
Yes, Kennedy is a touching, sympathetic figure who deserves our concern. But Gooding goes over the top to display every tender, tortured emotion. If you try to jerk one more tear out of us, you jerks, you’ll deserve what you get, which may be our quick exit to the cynical slasher flick in the next theater.
