[yasr_overall_rating]
On September 12, 1940, when they took the field for the first time, the Rangerettes made history, and changed the future of football halftime entertainment across Texas and the United States.
Fair warning: this review may enrage die-hard football fans, especially those residing in Texas.
I am not a fan of the game, nor the clone-like films that are based on it. Perhaps it’s my European roots (right, blame it on heritage) or general lack of interest in competitive sport (tennis and, to some degree, basketball being the two graceful exceptions to the rule). No matter how many times I tried to get into it, spurred by the cheers and enraged, drunken frenzy of friends, football never made sense to me. From my perspective, all those rules and regulations amount to a bunch of moderately-to-extremely- ignorant oafs running at each other at full speed. I’ve personally been through the U.S. college experience, where I witnessed those oafs being fabricated for glory: you get to skip all the classes you want and still get a good GPA, as long as you work out and attend practice and, most importantly, represent this great nation by ramming into your opponent – and, if you’re lucky, shattering some his bones.
Now, I’m not arguing that competitive sports bring a sense of camaraderie in hard times: the Super Bowl, the Olympics, Wimbledon – people from all across the world unite and cheer and forget about wars, I get it. On the flip side, it can be argued that competitive sports also lead to fans’ massacring each other over a team, as can be witnessed in the hooligan culture in countries like Britain and Russia, or the recent debacle over the Russians’ presence in the Rio Olympics – sports and politics fusing in the worst way imaginable. I would rather watch a searing film (preferably not a pseudo-inspirational, trite-as-fuck tale about an underdog sports team) or go to a potentially mind/life-altering concert than sit for over two hours in an overcrowded stadium, crammed with roaring twin-like fans, having beer spilled on me and… Am I an old curmudgeon or what?
If I ever do watch football, it’s for the half-time show. Filled with highly extravagant and silly antics, such as a mega-popular star belting it out, cheerleaders stacking themselves on top of each other like cards and the occasional nipple slip, this IS America, folks: elated for no reason, drunk on its own glory, silly – and very entertaining. Chip Hale’s run-of-the-mill documentary, “Sweethearts of the Gridiron,” takes a look at the “world-famous Kilgore College Rangerettes,” a group of cheerleaders who awed a nation with their mind-boggling routines (forget Stephen Hawking, THIS is some stimulating stuff) back in 1940 and “changed football halftime forever.” The synopsis is misleading however, giving the impression that the doc will throw a retrospective glance back at the history of the Rangerettes – instead, it briefly lingers on the past and focuses mostly on the present. Perhaps the cheerleaders’ story is not worthy of a full-length doc itself – but neither is this heap of trash.
We follow a group of young, athletic girls in Texas, trying out for the Rangerettes cheerleading team. They go through their daily practice sessions, which the doc sometimes portrays as arduous as army training. Both determined and a bit shallow – think high-school brats with potential – they share their trepidation and wisdom with us throughout. “I wanna be here so badly,” is repeated over and over again, emphasizing how badly they wanna be here. “If you want to get there, you have to work hard for it,” is one of the defining lines of the doc. (Shit, really? I have to reevaluate my life now.) Two of the girls decorate their room with “streamers, dangly stars and flag banners,” an explosion of red-white-and-blue to keep those patriotic spirits soarin.’ “It is meant to be pretty,” Shelley Wayne, the Rangerette choreographer declares during practice. “Pretty and regal.” Re-reading this paragraph, I just came to an epiphany: this would have made a perfect Christopher Guest satire. “Best in Show II: This Is Spinal Bend,” anyone?
The only semi-diverting parts come from the original Rangerettes themselves, nostalgically reflecting on the good old days. “We were the first ever, and when we were there, we were the best ever,” one says, chuckling. The Mayor of Kilgore, Ronnie Spradlin, comments, “They were unique here and, like anything successful, they were copied over and over… Every high school in the nation has dancing girls.” In other words, the gargantuan degree of their influence on this nation is, well, unfathomable. If I dig real deeply for more redeeming characteristics, I’d point out some cool archival footage and a few instances of graceful, almost-balletic moves.
But that’s really about it. I wish I could “high-kick” this documentary. “Sweethearts of the Gridiron” is a dull experience, akin to watching a third-rate reality series compressed into 90 uneventful minutes. It would have made a much more interesting doc if it examined the somewhat-sexist implications behind cheerleading (one could argue the entire thing amounts to scantily-clad women twerking to cheer up the boys; even historically, as the doc points out, women never got to mingle with the boys, and this was their opportunity to stand out, be the “dancing girls” along with the marching band), its ramifications, relationship to the sport itself (which is barely ever mentioned), the impact of cheerleading, and sports in general in contemporary society. It does not succeed at portraying two potentially-intriguing trajectories: the cheerleader experience and how it evolved between 1940 and today; and the paths of the current-day girls to becoming Rangerettes. There are no standout personalities or memorable character trajectories, no subdued context, no filmmaking flourishes and no suspense to the proceedings – this is a straightforward account of a bunch of well-meaning, hard-working high school graduates who just want to cheer.
The documentary, like the sport it reveres, remains vacuous, a waste of time and potential on both the filmmakers’ part and the hard-working girls, who in my mind at least, could project their skills into something more substantial, like ballet, an art form that has the potential to change lives. On the other hand, if there were no cheerleaders, there would be no half-time show, and that would take away my experience of tuning in, in hopes of another boob slipping out, or Beyoncé tripping over a cheerleader, or Pink hitting the wrong note. It’s all scandalous and entertaining, and this nation would be a horrid, horrid place without it.
Available on DVD & Digital September 6th
