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Two particular arguments in this hopelessly biased article rang especially comical. Firstly, Mr. Clark was constantly quoting the sniping Mary Valentin (wife of Steve Grossman, the assistant coach of Whitney Young’s saintly academic decathlon team–boy, there’s a source with little prejudice!), but her remarks were so acidic and catty and holier-than-thou they handily repulsed any empathy. I raised my eyebrows especially high for her comment about the student on the Steinmetz High School team who was supposedly portrayed as the hero of the film. Valentin ends a paragraph of self-righteousness by pointing out the student is now “just a mom working in a mall.” I, actually, have had occasion to know many fine moms who worked in malls, including my own mom, and they were all upstanding people who, humbled by circumstance, never had occasion to behave like total raving snobs.
As for Cheaters, I have not seen the film, but a mainstay of acting and creating drama is to “play the opposite,” a method culling the more interesting performance, presenting the conflict of a situation as a more difficult puzzle to resolve. My guess would be that director John Stockwell is landing his sympathies with the apparent bad guys to better understand how we sin and what we gain/lose from it, and to bring out the gray instead of the black and white in the incident. And he probably takes some fictional liberties to pave the way for this intent, which is his absolute right as a filmmaker. I’m sure Mr. Clark and Co. would’ve preferred a spoon-fed, cut-and-dry movie about the holy Whitney Young conquering the scourge of Steinmetz, but the rest of us prefer when movies are interesting and thought provoking.
