Hoosiers is indeed a powerful film if you give yourself over to it, largely because it is so earnestly pure. There is something deeply admirable about its respect for passion and forgiveness, not necessarily in that order. Against all odds, it achieves a level of the mythical without being cloying or simplistic. Its based-on-a-true-story account of a small-town Indiana basketball team going to the state championship in the early 1950s is a blip on the map of genuinely important historical events. But, what makes it ring so genuine is the way in which the filmmakers use this story as a vehicle to convey with emotional acuity the larger-then-life themes of hope and redemption. It embodies Vince Lombardi’s famous proclamation that it’s not the size of the dog in the fight, but the fight in the dog without the self-indulgent near-sightedness of his other famous saying, “Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing.”

Hoosiers takes place in 1951, and it begins with the arrival of Norman Dale (Gene Hackman), a man in his early 50s, in the tiny, unsophisticated town of Hickory, Indiana. As one character puts it, when a man of his age comes to a place like Hickory, he’s either running from something or he has no place else to go. Norman has been hired to be the new head basketball coach at Hickory High School, which has a total enrollment of less than 200 students. He is an old friend of the principal, Cletus (Sheb Wooley), who has clearly brought Norman in as a favor. Norman’s past is murky at this point, as we learn that he once coached college basketball, but hasn’t coached for a dozen years and has been in the Navy for the past decade.

In a town like Hickory, outside of farming, basketball is the binding glue that holds the town together, and Norman immediately threatens the town’s well-worn sense of how it’s always been done by doing things his own way. The local men who gather at the barber shop to discuss one-on-one versus zone defense don’t take to the way Norman ignores their advice, and they are completely oblivious to the brilliance of his military-like plan, which involves breaking down the young players and then building them back up into something stronger and better. All they see is an outsider upsetting the balance.

But, Norman knows what he’s doing, and soon the team is not only winning, but beating bigger and stronger teams on their way to the playoffs and eventually the state championship. One of the reasons Hoosiers works so well is the way it shows how the team’s successes resonate and affect different groups of people, thus making these successes infinitely more meaningful than just victories on a basketball court. For the team members, the team’s success is a source of pride that transcends their limited worldview in a tiny town like Hickory, where they haven’t seen a building taller than two stories. For the town, it is a means by which they can come together as a community, which is illustrated beautifully in the way the warm, amber tones of the basketball games contrast with the cool, hard grays of the Indiana winter outside. And, for Norman Dale, the team’s success is a form of redemption, a means by which he can reclaim past glory without the mistakes of his earlier years. He is a man running from something, but he’s also a man running to something: a better sense of himself.

The theme of redemption is also played out in the character of Shooter (Dennis Hopper), the town drunk who regularly embarrasses his son, who is a member of the basketball team. In Shooter, Norman recognizes some of himself—not just an innate love of basketball (Shooter turns out to be more knowledgeable about the game than anyone), but a sense of past tragedies haunting present life. Shooter’s drunkenness is an escape, just as Norman’s disappearance into the Navy years ago was an escape, and in bringing Shooter on as an assistant coach and forcing him to sober up, Norman gives him the second chance no one else would. In this sense, Hoosiers is a beautifully optimistic film that suggests good deeds are passed on from person to person (Cletus gives Norman a second chance, thus Norman gives Shooter a second chance, and so on) without explicitly rubbing our noses in it.

First-time director David Anspaugh and screenwriter Angelo Pizzo are both Indiana natives, so they understand the culture of the world they’re portraying. Pizzo’s script leaves room for the details of everyday life without choking the narrative, and Anspaugh’s direction is solid and effective without ever being showy. In films of this sort, it’s easy to trivialize small-town culture, but Anspaugh and Pizzo avoid the clichés and instead focus on the texture of lived experience in a tiny farming community like Hickory. There is a real sense of life throughout Hoosiers, both on the court and off, which imbues it with a realism that helps balance its more romantic notions.

Much of the film’s success can also be attributed to its performances, particularly Gene Hackman, who embodies all of Norman’s sometimes contradictory tendencies—his tenderness and his violence, his intelligence and his anger, his patience and his frustration—and makes them seem organically connected. Norman is not always a pleasant man, but he is always real. For this reason, it is a shame that a subplot involving his relationship with another teacher, Myra Fleener (Barbara Hershey), seems so forced and unnatural. Much of their story was left on the cutting room floor for reasons of time, and it shows in the awkward transitions from immediate animosity, to guarded friendship, to eventual romance.

Ultimately, though, Hoosiers is about what takes place on the basketball court, and it is there that the film soars. All the young men who play the members of the team were nonactors hired primarily for their ability to play basketball, which helps enormously in giving the game sequences an air of authenticity. Anspaugh builds the tension of the games to wonderful heights, and never overplays his hand. There’s not much surprise in the story’s development, and when the team gets to the big game against a much larger team in front of a crowd larger than Hickory’s entire population, there’s no shock in how it turns out. Yet, it is done with such attention to detail and genuine love of the characters and their dreams that it’s impossible not to be moved. Throwing a ball through an iron hoop never seemed like such an overwhelming cosmic gesture.

Copyright ©2012 James Kendrick

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