Fridae

There are two types of Oscar-worthy documentaries. The investigative documentary poses a question so intriguing, we follow the filmmaker as he jumps down the rabbit hole. It could be "Who killed the electric car?", "What happens if I eat nothing but McDonald's food for the next year?", "How real is global warming?" or even "Why did those kids in Columbine have to die?"

In Undefeated, the filmmakers follow a football coach for a historically black high school in Tennessee over the course of a sporting year. The poorly funded team has never won a single game in their 110 years of existence. He wants them to start winning games and make it into the play-offs at least. That's in addition to his other grand project to keep these troubled youths out of juvenile prison, improve on their studies, and give them a chance to make good through sports. The coach has a mantra: Football doesn't build character; it reveals character. He sees his job to build that character. On their end, a successful football season would mean a possible football scholarship and a ticket out of their decaying town and broken families.

Undefeated is what I call an allegorical real-life drama. It's more than just a sports documentary that's a piece of Americana. Coach's insistence on building up character in his unruly football players, the realities of race and class, the vast difference between the haves and have-nots, the possibility of a reward or a golden ticket if one works hard enough to deserve it — as a factual documentary, Undefeated features characters whose beliefs, speech and actions betray an awareness that sometimes in order to make sense of your own life, you may have to tell it like a fictional narrative.

Undefeated makes for great watching. It presents the real life of its subjects as an allegory for the American condition. Yet because these subjects narrate their struggles as an allegory (self-consciously at times and unconsciously at others), the film comes off as genuine and sincere.