Niki Caro‘s McFarland USA (Disney, 2.20), which screens this Saturday at the Santa Barbara Film Festival, has been given a mixed-respectful review by Variety‘s Justin Chang. In keeping with the politically correct view that white guys are a drag and ethnics are more planted and soulful, Chang complains that the film, a Hoosiers-like tale of a downmarket Latino track team winning big, “is treated as a Kevin Costner vehicle first and foremost.” Pic “earns points for its big-hearted portrait of life in an impoverished California farming town, but with its overriding emphasis on how Coach Costner fits into that world, it never sheds its outsider perspective, ultimately emerging a well-intentioned mix of compassion and condescension.
“Not unlike The Blind Side, McFarland, USA is likely to generate some criticism for being the umpteenth film about a white guy productively intervening in the lives of underprivileged minority youth — a charge that has less to do with the facts of Jim White’s genuinely inspiring legacy than with the particular dramatic emphasis that Caro has given them here. Pic “feels at once mildly progressive and unavoidably retrograde. It presents brief, obligatory snapshots of how the other half lives without ever seeming deeply invested, or even particularly interested, in what it’s showing us.