Champions, the review: diversity according to Bobby Farrelly

Campioni’s review: in the new film, in cinemas from May 31, Bobby Farrelly dances alone. Like his brother Peter, Bobby also moves towards a more mature type of cinema, but his is not a clear turn, and he still maintains that irreverence of the old Farrelly Brothers.

The dear old man Woody Harrelson. What a pleasure to see him on the big screen. But above all dear old Bobby Farrelly, already in the award-winning company Fratelli Farrelly, who gave us so many laughs between the 1990s and the early 2000s with There’s Something About Mary, Me, Me & Irene, Love at First Sight. It’s a pleasure to meet him too. As we tell you in the review of Samplesout in cinemas on May 31, Bobby Farrelly dances alone, after his brother Peter did too, with the film Yes Oscar Green Book. Like his brother, Bobby Farrelly here too moves towards a more mature type of cinema. But his is not a sharp turn like Peter’s. Bobby still maintains that irreverence of the old Farrelly Brothers, which hid so much sensitivity inside. Guitto, but with a heart. What the two brothers, hidden among a thousand gags, have always had.

From the J League to the young adults with intellectual disabilities team

Marcus Marakovich (Woody Harrelson) is the classic loser, the classic loser of many American films. He is the coach of a J League team, certainly not of the NBA, and he is not also the head coach, but the deputy. The first coach never listens to Marcus, even though he understands basketball. If he didn’t get to the top, it seems, it’s also due to his not easy character. And it is. During a game, a few seconds from the end, he pushes the coach who doesn’t want to listen to his scheme. Fired, he finds nothing better than to get caught driving under the influence of the police. The judge decides to commute the sentence to 90 days of social services: he will be the coach of a basketball team of young adults with intellectual disabilities, the Friends. “It’s impossible to coach those guys“. “Impossible is not evidence, it is an opinion“. It is the dialogue between Marcus and the center manager. As you can imagine, in we will see some good things.

Green Book and the others: films in which diversity unites

A new way of seeing diversity

Samples it is one of those films that score a new way of seeing diversity. Without pietistic tones, without doing good, without hypocrisy. In Italy we have already done it and well. Above all, screenwriters such as Fabio Bonifacci did it (It can be done) and Nicola Guaglianone (Lo chiamavano Jeeg Robot, Freaks Out, Indivisible), but also Federico Biondi (Daphne). The key is to treat these guys like people”normal” (and we already don’t like using this term), with their strengths, their defects. So the boys of Samples they are whimsical, mischievous, foul-mouthed. There are those who constantly talk about sex, those who make barracks jokes, those who don’t say things to bring those who deserve it into line, even the coach (it’s the hilarious Cosentino). Yes, these guys are irresistible.

The appearance and its reversal

Bobby Farrelly, as you can imagine, immediately plays with a classic of films of this type, which is the appearance and its overturning. He presents the boys to us as a group of unlikely players, and maybe they really are. But shortly after he makes us tell their lives, and shows us that they are very good at their job, or to cross the whole city on a scooter to enjoy those two hours of sport, or to speak four languages. It is an important thing to do in these cases. Because it must be said that these guys can work, have a private life, play sports, do many things. They can do almost anything.

The protagonists of the film are voiced by guys with the same specifics

But Campioni’s trump card, beyond the story (which comes from a Spanish film, champions, known in Italy with the title We just have to win) is that to interpret these basketball champions so special there are real kids with disabilities, who bring to the film their human charge, their charge of sympathy and that element of truth and spontaneity that would be difficult to reproduce. As Benigni did in Johnny Toothpick and how did Federico Biondi with DaphneBobby Farrelly also brings a protagonist with Down Syndrome, Johnny, to the screen, treating him with care and at the same time letting his energy unleash. But the choice of Universal Italia is even more ingenious which, for the Italian edition, has chosen to have boys with the same specificities as the characters dub the protagonists of the film. At the press preview we met them, we applauded them, we shook their hand. It is not a choice of inclusiveness for its own sake, but an artistic choice that is perfectly functional to the film. The dubbing works wonderfully: we don’t hear mangled voices, which try to imitate those of the original actors, but credible voices.

Woody Harrelson is a bildungsroman in reverse

There are the irresistible boys from Friends, and then there’s their reverse shot. Which is Marcus, played by that Woody Harrelson who has a face that, however you want to put it, fits everywhere. From his point of view Samples is one of those”Bildungsromans in reverse“, one of those stories in which an adult, still immature, arrives in a place filled with cynicism and selfishness and ends up getting involved. Someone who should teach but doesn’t want to, and who in the end not only teaches something, but ends up to learn even more than he teaches. Marcus is like the Dewey Finn of Jack Black in School Of Rock and the Billy Bob Thornton’s What a beating if you meet bears. It is no coincidence that we are two films (in the second case we are talking about the remake) shot by Richard Linklater. And it is precisely to Linklater’s cinema, the lighter one and not the romantic and philosophical one, that it resembles Samples.

From Green Book to the Smollett case: cinema, racism and the importance of Black Consciousness

The sense of cinema that Peter and Bobby Farrelly made together

Samples it has just the right blend of comedy and drama, right and wrong, uplifting and hilarious. There are the old Farrelly brothers and there is also a new way of making cinema, less extreme in the gags, less oriented towards the search for politically incorrect and demented, which was their hallmark. But which, after all, has the same sense of cinema that Peter and Bobby Farrelly did together. Behind their hyperbolic choices, there was always a dedicated attention to disability: let’s think about Me, me & Irene, Love at first sight, Skin brothers. Here the discourse on diversity is simply more direct, told in a (relatively) more traditional language. In short, Bobby speaks to us in a new way. But he is always one of the loved ones Farrelly Brothers that we love so much.