Why Root for Rudy?
A meandering rant no one asked for about a beloved sports film I found bafflingly bad
For most of my life I’ve been an obsessive collector of good movie scores. I’ve been on this decades long pursuit of the best soundtracks I can listen to, ones that make me feel transcendently, majestically, powerfully alive. When I find one I like, I stash it away in a playlist that I can call on when I need extra motivation.
If you catalog movie scores like I do, you quickly identify the heavy hitters. Yes, there’s Hans Zimmer, the T-Rex of contemporary composers. Everyone knows him for the sawing strings and cacophonous chorus of horns from the Gladiator and Pirates of the Caribbean themes. The man won’t orchestrally pigeonhole himself as only making “horny” music, however, and has successfully explored choral music in his Oscar-winning Lion King soundtrack and the surreal ode to church organs that was the Insterstellar score. Zimmer even has a quiet, sentimental side, too. The melodic murmuring of many marimbas that makes of "You're so cool" from Tarantino's True Romance soundtrack is to this day the most joyful and relaxing song I've ever listened to.
The top of the mountain for film scores as far as I’m concered are the few composers whose work so defined the films they’re in that you can’t discuss their legacy or emotional impact without including the music. In this camp I’d submit Bernard Hermann’s Psycho score, Howard Shores score for Lord of the Rings, and Ennio Morricone’s score for The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. The epitome of this kind of movie-defining composer is John Williams, whose themes for Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Jurassic Park have forever changed movies and our collective sonic landscape for the better.
Just as their are “coaching trees” in NFL lore, so too are there “scoring trees.” Zimmer is so influential that his protégés have gone on to become famous in their own right. Steve Jablonsky, who got a job working for Zimmer after cold-calling him, went on to make a name for himself along with lots of money scoring the Transformers movies (before you scoff, listen to “Scorponok” and tell me you feel nothing). He also created my personal favorite “great song from a mediocre movie,” the anthemic “My name is Lincoln,” from Michael Bays 2005 head-scratcher, The Island. I believe this song will spontaneously begin playing if we ever achieve world peace. Another frequent Zimmer collaborator, Rubert Gregson Williams, has since gone on to pen the emotionally stirring music for Netflix’s “The Crown,” whose rousing horn sections definitely show a hint of Zimmer’s influence.
It’s not all bombastic boys, though. I also adore the introspective softness of Thomas Newmans scoring, epitomized by his emotive music in The Shawshank Redemption, Finding Nemo, and Wall-E. For music with a heavy dose of melodramatic longing and delightful Celtic influences there’s the late, great, James Horner who gave us the enduring themes to Braveheart, Titanic, and Avatar, to name a few. It’s thankfully not all boys, either. Rachel Portman’s main titles from Chocolat has a mysterious, magical quality to them I can’t quite place and can’t stop listening to.
This obsessive exploration of the world of movie soundtracks started with composers and movies I grew up listening to, and has since spiraled outwards into composers and films I’m less familiar with. This is how I stumbled upon a name who has gotten overshadowed by the likes of of Zimmer, Williams, and Horner: Jerry Goldsmith. Goldsmith gave us the scores for Chinatown, Stark Trek, The Omen, and Brendan Fraser’s 1999 masterpiece The Mummy. As I explored his work, I found one song in particular that was so profoundly uplifting that I couldn’t stop listening to it, one of Goldsmith’s most beloved and reused scores:"Tryouts.” This triumphant piece of music is so catchy it's been used in everything from the Angels in the Outfield Trailer to the walk on song for John McCains doomed presidential run.
After listening to it for the 30th time to power through an afternoon of copywriting, I finally asked myself:
”Why have I listened to this score so much but never actually seen the movie it’s from?”
On paper Rudy seemed like the kind of movie I would just love. The log line for this one is that Sean Astin plays a determined down-on-his-luck kid who dreams of one day playing football for Notre Dame. His persistence and grit pays off and he ends up playing in a big game for them. It's got an iconic score, a heart-felt performance by a young Samwise Gamgee, an inspirational underdog story, and is widely regarded as one of the best sports movies of all time, so I was bound to love it, right?
Here is why I hated, not disliked, hated, the film Rudy:
The main character has an arc so flat it makes Kansas appear like the Himalayas.The character writing in Rudy is bad across the board, but nowhere is it as detrimental to the story they're trying to tell than in the characterization of Rudy. Simply put, Rudy undergoes no change, growth, or development as a character to achieve his goal. He has no flaws, no depth, and really no motivation other than wanting to play football. At the beginning of the film he states his desire to suit up for a game with the Notre Dame football team. At the end of the film, he does that. While he faces some obstacles to get there (a friend dies in a steel mill accident, people repeatedly dismiss his dream as childish, he has to become academically eligible by attending community college), he doesn’t have to change or grow one bit to overcome any of this. We don’t see him learning any new skills or ditching any bad habits. He's basically just a persistent kid who just persists the whole film, repeatedly annoying his way to success much like one of those simplistic and obnoxious hooks from an earworm Black Eyed Peas song. As a brief aside, The Black Eyed Peas use musical hooks like a teenager who has recently found the clitoris and proceeds to barrage it with one finger like he’s trying to frantically dial 911. While persistence is an admirable trait, the problem that we never see Rudy learn how to believe in himself and never see him actually trying to become a better football player. We don't see him overcoming self doubt, walking away from a toxic relationship, or ever touching a weight or running some sprints to improve his form on the field. Instead he repeatedly tells us that he will achieve his goal, which then he does. There's no arc to speak of.
To illustrate my point, here are 3 character arcs that would have been 200% better for Rudy:
Rudy wants to be good at football but has to learn how to play unselfishly. This is the character arc of the protagonist in 2005’s Goal, a paint by numbers soccer film whose modest amount of complexity feels like Moonlight compared to this one.
Rudy must overcome his physical deficiency with hard work. The film tells us that Rudy is too small to play defense, but does nothing with this. Instead, show us him compensating for his size with a thorough training regimen, practicing during the off-season with teammates, and studying film after hours- imagine a hybrid of Julian Edelman and Luke Kuechly’s NFL careers.
Rudy must overcome childhood trauma of some sort. You could even run with the stereotypically midwestern steel mill accident that happens in the film, but for the love of God show us how its devastated him emotionally and then show us how he works through these demons via football. The film fumbles this plot point entirely, showing us his friend dying in an accident, but never sharing anything about how that effects him or his dream. The only thing it seems to affect is his wardrobe, since he develops a soft spot for the varsity jacket that his friend bought him.
Okay enough amateur screenwriting, let’s get back to why I hated this movie.
Sean Astin's performance is saccharine, obnoxious, and child-like. To briefly quote Obama, “Let me be clear,” Sean Astin will always be one of my favorite actors because of the performance he gave me as Sam in the Lord of the Rings. That's precisely why I loathed this role: he’s given a comically simple and irritating person to portray and no amount of good acting can make that watchable. He’s prone to spontaneously impersonating a football announcer, mimicking the game call with a childlike enthusiasm that’s off putting coming from a college student. Not only that, but his juvenile obsession with acting like a football player actively gets in the way of his dream of becoming one. A central plot point is the Notre Dame groundskeeper generously giving Rudy a job helping him out so he can have some money, a place to stay, and be closer to the football field. Rudy repays his generosity by goofing off while on the job, repeatedly stopping work to pretend he's playing football with the same sort of self-referential narration you see five year olds doing with their friends in the park. It's cute when a toddler does it, but when a grown man who we've seen drinking beer and hitting on women a scene prior does it it gives off weird man child vibes. Most obnoxiously, half of his dialog is telling people that he’s going to suit up for the fighting Irish. It’s charming the first time, good to know the second, and then quickly stereotypes him as a one-note obsessive bordering on unhinged:
“I’m going to play for the Irish some day.”
“Oh that’s wonderful young man. I visited Dublin once.”
“I’m going to play for the Irish some day.”
“Sir, this is an Arbys”
“I’m going to play for the Irish some day.”
“That’s nice, but I’m going to need to see your license and registration, please step out of the car and put down the foam finger.”
Jon Favreau is here, and acting in a terrible role that's aged terribly. I have no issue with Jon Favreau acting. Chef is one of my favorite feel-good films. What I can't handle is his performance in Rudy. He plays the awkwardly named “D-Bob,” a man who agrees to help tutor Rudy so he can make the grade to transfer to Notre Dame. The catch is he’ll only do this if Rudy helps him learn how to talk to girls. This cringey premise gets even worse than it sounds hen Rudy goes about fulfilling this promise by immediately walking up to everyone with a vagina and a pulse he can find on campus and introducing them to Favreau in a overly direct manner that makes Barney Stinson's "Haaaaave ya met Ted?" routine from “How I Met Your Mother” look like a masterclass in flirting in comparison. D-Bob then leaves Rudy to attend law school and only returns for the final game. He arrives ceremoniously in a limousine, drinking champagne, and wearing a fur coat- the implication being that somehow just enrolling in law school made him instantly wealthy. Having known multiple people who have actually gone to law school, I can tell you that this is not the case. Our student loan crisis would look a lot different if it was.
The climactic game is utterly meaningless. Here's what totally broke me about this movie: after nearly two hours of Sean Astin telling everyone who will listen that he intends to suit up and play football for the Notre Dame fighting Irish, he gets in the game and does basically nothing. In a game that Notre Dame is already winning against Georgia Tech, Rudy comes in for 2 plays, sacking the quarterback in the final one to end the game. Here's the problem: the score is 23-3. Not only was his involvement quite literally for optics; they were going to win the game whether or not he played, robbing even the heroic sack of any conceivable significance. The film asks you to rest everything on the mere symbolism of him being allowed to play after bothering everyone around him about wanting to play all movie long. In a country that’s supposedly against participation trophies, this entire film ends up being nothing but an agonizingly long participation trophy.
It's a cliche Hollywood sports movie that takes the wrong liberties with the source material. All sports movies, but especially those based on real events bend plausibility and leave huge things out to make the end result more palatable, more exciting, and more dramatic. To illuminate how badly the writers of Rudy missed the mark on this front, let’s compare their script to the screenplay of Remember the Titans. This film is unapologetic about taking creative liberties in the name of telling a feel-good story. Many of the scenes depicting racial tension off the field were made up for dramatic effect, it was a toilet not a brick hurled through coach Boone's window, and coach Boone in real life had little of Denzel's legendary charisma. Most importantly for this discussion, in real life, the state final game was a blowout that the Titans easily won, but the film wisely made it a nail-biter. So I cannot fathom why in Rudy, they opted to keep the final game a lopsided “accurate” affair instead of fabricating some back and forth drama and then inserting Rudy into the middle of that and therefore giving him an actual role to play. This would be the perfect moment for him to show us how he’s grown or changed as a character and let this momentum power their victory, but somehow that’s a line they just wouldn’t cross.
The Jersey seen adds nothing. Instead of having the creativity and bravery to make the final game exciting to watch, the screenwriters of Rudy repeatedly fictionalized the wrong parts of the real story. We witness a scene where the starting players all walk into the coaches office and turn over their jersey's and say they'd like Rudy to play in their place. It's the dramatic moment when the head coach has to finally give into the pressure and let Rudy play. Just one problem: this never happened. The real coach at the time had announced to the team that Rudy was going to dress for the Georgia Tech game a week prior, and no dramatic jersey surrendering was necessary. Hall of Fame QB Joe Montana was playing on this team at the time of the "Rudy Game" and has definitively corroborated that the jersey incident never happened. So what is this scene supposed to add? Why fabricate out of whole cloth a scene that never happened to give him a small obstacle to getting on the field but then refuse to add a bigger, more interesting obstacle for him such as a proper character arc or even a moderately interesting final game?
In summary, just imagine how bad Lord of the Rings would be if it was structured the way Rudy is:
Sam is a childish, working class hobbit whose best friend is tragically lost in a pipe weed smoking accident. His dream is to one day go on a long walk with Frodo. People doubt if he’s good enough at walking to accompany Frodo all the to Mordor but he’s extremely persistent. Finally, at the council of Elrond, the other members of the fellowship place their weapons in front of Elrond (you can’t have my sword…) and say they won’t go to Mordor if Sam isn’t allowed to come too. Elrond finally relents and Sam is allowed to accompany them as a sort of mascot, despite knowing full well he will not do anything in combat. Sam accompanies Frodo as far as Moria where he proceeds to stab exactly one orc who Legolas already shot dead with an arrow to the jugular. The fellowship carries Frodo off the bridge of Khazad Dum, triumphant. Gandalf shouts: “Cry, you fools!”
Ultimately, I was left dumbstruck by how a film I got so little enjoyment from watching has become such a beloved touchstone of American sports media. I couldn’t let this dissatisfaction just be. Unlike Rudy, I actually did something instead of just talking about what I was going to do. Here’s my working theory of why Rudy is so enduring despite being decidedly not for me:
Americans love films about Notre Dame football that venerate the program on a surface level but don’t challenge us to think much deeper. I break this theory into two parts:
Why Notre Dame football?
Notre Dame football is like a religion for many people, which is saying something for a school that’s already so explicitly religious. This isn’t by accident. Historically they are one of the country’s most successful college football programs, having won 11 national championships to date. It is worth noting that 7 of these were in the early days of the sport when throwing a forward pass was a novel tactic. I suspect Notre Dame fans may looks nostalgically back on this era the same way British people look back on the time when most other countries didn’t have as many boats as them, but I digress. I don’t want to throw too much shade on the program since I’m not a college football expert and have a good frisbee friend that went there. If you’re reading this Chowder, I still love you even though I didn’t care for Rudy!
I bring all this up because in researching this film, the mythical allure of Notre Dame as a focal point for magical football happenings just kept coming up. Lots of college teams win games, so where did this allure start outside of the on the field success? I discovered that you just can’t talk about the myth and legend of Notre Dame football without talking about Knute Rockne. Rockne the man was a very successful coach at Notre Dame during one of their early dynasties. Yet over time, his name has transcended the individual and become infused in the lore and lexicon of the sport much like Vince Lombardi of the Packers.
Rockne also matters a lot because he becomes an intertextual link between different Notre Dame football movies. In Rudy, Astin repeatedly references one other key vanity piece about Notre Dame Football: Knute Rockne, All American. Knute Rockne is a 1940 film about the Notre Dame football team starring none other than actor-turned-president Ronald Reagan as Notre Dame player George Gipp. After being diagnosed with terminal illness, Gipp tells his teammates to “win one for the Gipper,” which inspires them to achieve victory later. After he dies in a plane crash, he becomes a campus legend and gets a plaque in the locker room that Rudy ooohs and awws over like it’s the Mona Lisa. Tellingly, these two films (Rudy and Rockne) are some of the only movies that Notre Dame has allowed to be filmed on campus, so you can sort of see the finger prints of the school’s PR team in both of them. They are quite literally meant to be uncritical vanity pieces, otherwise they couldn’t be set here in the first place.
This came up more recently when I watched Untold: The Girlfriend That Didn’t Exist a fun but puzzlingly-put-together Netflix documentary that’s unnecessarily broken into two parts about the story of Notre Dame defensive phenom Manti Te’o. It’s a juicy romp that touches on Polynesian culture, sports, and masculinity but spends most of the runtime discussing Manti’s now infamous cat-fishing by a trans woman before cat-fishing or trans woman were widely used terms. In trying to explain why the public became so enamored with Manti’s senior season and then so upset when his dead girlfriend turned out to be a trans woman that was very much alive, the filmmakers assert that the all-American allure of Notre Dame football was part of the reason the story had such built-in, almost cinematic legs to it. They even cite Rockne and Rudy by name. Over time, the Gothic spires of Notre Dame have ended up serving as a sort of shorthand for American sports excellence, Hogwarts for college football.
Why the unwillingness to challenge us? Sports movies, like biopics, are often hamstrung by a formulaic structure and predictable plot beats that are incompatible with the nuanced contours of real life stories. This isn’t inherently a bad thing. Part of the appeal of movies like Remember the Titans, Angels in the Outfield, and Goal is that they their plots contain just enough obstacles to threaten the happy ending, but not enough to prevent or even complicate it too much. Remember the Titans would be much less fun to watch (though perhaps more culturally significant) if it depicted racism with the same unflinching realism of 12 Years a Slave or American History X. Angels in the Outfield would be grim and depressing if Joseph Gordon Levitt’s character lived in an abusive foster home instead of with the homey old lady that takes care of him and JP. If Goal depicted Santiago getting ostracized by his teammates for being Mexican, it would undermine the Polyanna perspective that the film revels in. However, sometimes this simplistic approach to telling a sports story shows its cracks. The Blind Side got so caught up in its indulgent white savior complex that it decided to portray a human being and athlete who played in 2 Superbowls, winning one of them as a helpless boy who just couldn’t understand how to block until Sandra Bullock told him what to do. The bigger problem with inherently simplistic narratives is that they are great for giving you a dose of child-like glee, but their staying power and impact is also limited by this child-like worldview. Anyone who has rewatched a beloved childhood film only to find it odd and jarring as an adult (it was Home Alone, Space Jam, and Austin Powers for me, most recently) knows the feeling of realizing that what they thought was uncomplicated fun has been lost forever now that you’ve grown out of it. The emotional refraction of nostalgia can filter, but not change a movie’s true colors.
That’s just my 100 cents, though. Zooming out, I can only believe that on several key levels, I’m just not the target audience for this film. While I love feel-good sports movies, I don’t love Notre Dame enough to watch anything set on its campus. So I’m not interested in diving this far into the bottom of the barrel of possible stories to tell that involve the Fighting Irish. Indeed, the legacy of this movie makes me wonder if Notre Dame Football is like Princess Diana for some people- there is literally no limit to the myopic focus of a story they’d enjoy being told about it:
Sure, we’ve covered her fashion, divorce, and untimely death in a car crash, but what if we made a film about: Her third date with Charles, what was she doing on the day the Berlin Wall fell, her childhood guinea pig, Peanuts, if she would enjoy Minecraft if she were alive today…
It might be for some, but it’s not for me. I personally reject the premise that that an equipment manager briefly taking the field for two snaps is worth dramatizing at all, especially since this incident only happened as as a prank, according to Joe Montana. Ultimately, it may be the Rudy was made before Hollywood perfected the right blend of cinematic sweeteners to make a movie like this properly. It may have been coasting on a nostalgic cushion that it didn’t exactly earn but hasn’t ever been challenged. Or it may just be that I’m the wrong type of Irish to enjoy this film, Irish in ancestry but not alma mater. All I know for sure is that when it’s all said and done, literally the only thing I loved about Rudy was the score- the music, definitely not the final game.