Harvard Beats Yale 29-29.

"For most of the world, I suspect, the year 1968 signifies upheaval, revolution, power to the people, Vietnam and My Lai, Paris in flames, Martin and Bobby, Nixon versus Humphrey," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "Another great rivalry played out that year in the form of a college football game. And while it seems absurd to include such a picayune event in the annals, the filmmaker Kevin Rafferty makes the case for remembrance and for the art of the story in his preposterously entertaining documentary Harvard Beats Yale 29-29, preposterous at least for those of us who routinely shun that pagan sacrament."

Updated through 11/21.

"This may or may not be the greatest instance of college football ever played," writes J Hoberman in the Voice, "but Brian's Song, Jerry Maguire and The Longest Yard notwithstanding, Rafferty's no-frills annotated replay is the best football movie I've ever seen: A particular day in history becomes a moment out of time."

"It's kind of amazing that a film about a sports game where the final score is in the title could be so suspenseful, but Mr. Rafferty manages to pull it off," writes Sara Vilkomerson in the New York Observer.

"Daisy-chained commentary and ample game footage (succinctly called by the late Don Gillis) comprise the film's entire contents, and if you can stomach the crushing indulgence of it all, the game's turnabout is indeed a doozy," writes Nicolas Rapold in the L Magazine.

"Rafferty's interview style is relentlessly anti-Errol Morris," notes Paul Brenner at Filmcritic.com. "Rather than floating backgrounds behind his subjects, Rafferty settles upon interviewing the ex-players in their kitchens and dining rooms, bric-a-brac and coffee makers usually behind them. Most of the key players on both teams put in their two cents, including Yale Bulldogs Mike Bouscaren (the defensive captain who 'was out hellbent for destruction') and quarterback Brian Dowling (who hadn't lost a game since the 7th grade and gained fame forever as B.D. in Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury comic strip), as well as Harvard Crimsons Vic Gatto (the halfback who reveals that the players took over the Harvard team 'in the spirit of 1968') and offensive guard and later Big Star Movie Actor Tommy Lee Jones, who recalls humorous anecdotes involving himself and roommate Al Gore."

Writing in the New Yorker, Richard Brody finds the film to be "a fascinating feat of cultural archeology."

Updates: "Rafferty, who was a Harvard undergrad at the time, renders the game a vivid and compelling experience even if (like me) you're not from the Northeast, didn't go to an Ivy school and don't give a crap about football," writes Andrew O'Hehir in Salon. "Social significance? I don't know about that. But Harvard Beats Yale 29-29 is a ripping good yarn, like a Fitzgerald short story rewritten by John Updike, with an uproarious, impossible Hollywood ending."

"The players' smarts and honesty is a non-fan's salvation," writes Bill Weber in Slant. "Harvard Beats Yale 29-29 paints college football not as epochal warfare but as a pastime with room for serendipity. Falling on a game-changing fumble, a Crimson back recollects, 'I just couldn't believe how simple it was.'"

Updates, 11/21: "'It was just a football game,' one interviewee sighs." David Fear in Time Out New York: "Harvard Beats Yale 29–29 ends up being just a football-game doc; the grace the movie displays in re-creating that match, however, still makes it a winner."

"Rafferty's play-by-play structure compromises the depth of his subject, as he attempts to make history entertaining," writes Armond White in the New York Press. "The antique green-toned TV footage is fascinatingly archaic, but the B&W inter-titles reveal a weak attempt at supplying drama (unlike [Adam] Yauch's [Gunnin' for That #1 Spot], which pointed toward an exhilarating new view of sports as anthropology). Rafferty's compromise is understandably affectionate, but it winds up an unwitting promotion of aristocracy."

"Harvard Beats Yale takes its own significance as innate, and rarely strives to be anything more than one long anecdote," writes Noel Murray at the AV Club. "It's good to meet these men and hear their stories, and get some sense of what it was like to go to school at two of America's enduring institutions during a time when the aristocracy was out of favor. It's only a sense, though, not a deeper understanding."

Posted by dwhudson at November 19, 2008 8:03 AM