Pride and True

Terrence Howard can't keep this overextended biopic afloat.

by Shaun Brady

It's been a good year for Philly sports underdogs. No, not the real ones, who for the most part failed to deserve the "under" half of that name. But on movie screens, Vince Papale's real-life improbable run with the Eagles was followed by Rocky Balboa's fictional improbable comeback. Pride splits the difference, bending, folding and mutilating Jim Ellis' real-life story to fit the fictional Hollywood mold.

GLANCING BLOWS: Jim Ellis (Terrence Howard) looks around for a director capable of crafting a passable swimming scene. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

The actual Ellis, who still coaches swimming at Marcus Foster Pool in Nicetown, is a Cheyney University grad who went from water safety instructor at city recreation centers to forming an African-American swim team whose name he changed to PDR after opening Foster in 1980.

PDR, of course, stands for Philadelphia Department of Recreation. In one of the metronomically regular inspirational speeches that the onscreen version of Ellis, played by Terrence Howard, gives, he insists that it should instead stand for Pride, Determination and Resilience. Given the film's depiction of the facts, maybe that should be amended to Pretty Dubious Re-enactment.

This version of Ellis attended college in North Carolina, where his unexpected integration of a swim meet full of booing white folks ends with his arrest at the hand of bigoted cops. That arrest haunts him, and provides the requisite romantic obstacle with the pretty young City Council member he ends up wooing when, unemployed, he finds himself in Philly.

But this Philly isn't Philly: It's New Orleans. Despite the constant interjection of helicopter shots swooping around Billy Penn's hat, that vintage SEPTA bus travels some pretty unfamiliar routes, unless someone can point me toward where all those plantation houses and willow trees are on the Main Line.

Read J.F. Pirro's interview with the real Jim Ellis.

The movie version of Ellis gets turned down for a job by Tom Arnold's cigar-chomping swim coach at the fictional (what isn't?) Main Line Academy. (Never trust a guy who practices putting in his office.) He then finds himself working for the city, entrusted with packing up the destined-for-demolition Foster, where he finds janitor Bernie Mac hoping to save the rec center that kept him off the streets as a kid (all of this in 1974, six years before the real Foster was opened).

Of course, Ellis rediscovers his love of swimming, opens the pool and saves a batch of high-schoolers from the clutches of the least effective neighborhood drug kingpin in recent memory. (Ah, for the days when North Philly retaliation meant pissing in the pool.) He, of course, leads his ragtag band to the state finals against those longtime champion Main Liners, and, well, you know the rest.

Ellis gives his tacit approval by appearing in a one-line walk-on, but his hope for the film is purely functional — that it brings attention to the sort of program that he still oversees. Almost the only thing that Pride does take from Ellis' true story is the swimming, which is also its least successful element. There's a reason that high-impact sports like football and soccer show up on screen so often: There's nothing inherently exciting about watching guys do laps. First-time director Sunu Gonera struggles with the swimming scenes throughout, his camera fidgeting from one side of the pool to the other, hovering overhead and occasionally dipping its toes into the water. But he never finds an angle that can create drama out of breaststrokes.

Howard and Mac are the only variables saving the film from utter sports cliche purgatory. Mac gives a blustery performance, full of tics and physical business that somehow congeal to create a character far more three-dimensional than the comic relief on the page.

Howard holds the reins of the whole production, setting the pace with his deliberate timing. He's said that the one thing he most wanted to replicate from the actual Jim Ellis was the man's composure; whether that's what he does is irrelevant, but he does capture a man choking back his anger, recriminating himself for the times when it erupts. The past that made the man is ever-present between Howard's words.

Gonera's recognition that his two leads are all that he has to work with may explain the perfunctory way the rest of the story spins. Climaxes have a funny way of playing out off-screen so that the camera can watch Mac and Howard react to a letter or a news report. Even the big meet ends not inside with the team, but out front with the coaches. By film's end, Gonera has finally learned how to make the swimming work: Everybody out of the pool.

(s_brady@citypaper.net)

Pride

Directed by Sunu Gonera A Lions Gate Entertainment release