12 Mighty Orphans: If Success Has Many Parents, This Film Is the Opposite
By Liam Lacey
Rating: D
Sometimes researching the background of a movie proves more revealing than the film itself.
Such is the case with 12 Mighty Orphans, an inspirational true story about a football team of triumphant underdogs during the Great Depression. The story is told by a folksy narrator, school physician Dr. Hall (Martin Sheen), who describes how a serious, bespectacled football coach, Rusty Russell (Luke Wilson) came to an orphanage and turned a group of poor scrawny kids into state champions.
There are a few impediments along the way, including the dismissal of a sadistic instructor (Seinfeld’s Wayne Knight in a pencil moustache), the doctor’s alcohol problem, and some scheming rivals. Otherwise, this is a pigskin version of Dead Poets Society, as the self-sacrificing coach — supported by his loving wife Juanita (Vinessa Shaw) and cute daughter Betty (Josie Fink) — teaches these lost boys how to dream.
In turn, their success inspires the nation, as Franklin Delano Roosevelt (Larry Pine) phones in support, reminding the coach we have nothing to fear except fear itself. Robert Duvall, another Texas institution, pops up in a cameo as the school’s backer. We learn once again that anyone with enough grit can pull themselves up from their bootstraps, even if, like the boys in the film, you start out barefoot.
The facts behind this competent formulaic hokum are essentially true. Russell, who coached Fort Worth’s Masonic Home and School, created a football powerhouse from a small, charity-funded school. In his effort to find a way to get his smaller players to defeat bigger, stronger teams, he helped develop the “spread offense,” now used in football at all levels.
It’s also true that one of the players portrayed in the film, Hardy Brown (played by Jake Austin Walker), later became a linebacker for several NFL teams in the 1950s, where he was one of the most feared hitters in the game, regularly knocking opponents unconscious with his brutal shoulder hits.
Some of the other stories around the film are less reliable. The screenplay is based on a 2007 book by Texas sportswriter and author Jim Dent, who wrote about “the skinny but fearless kids who brought hope to all in the cruelest years of the Depression.”
PROUDLY SUPPORTS ORIGINAL-CIN
The book, written in the New Journalism style of creative reconstruction, uses direct quotes describing conversations that happened more than 80 years ago, and has been criticized by former residents of the school for inaccuracies, including Dent’s use of the number “12” and the word “orphans.”
The author himself is quite a character. In 2015, he was sentenced to 10 years in jail for jumping bail after his tenth conviction for drunk driving. Previously, in 2003, he was sentenced to eight years for violating his parole for the same crime. While in prison last year, he caught COVID and recovered. A headline in the Fort Worth Star Telegram this past June reported, “12 Mighty Orphans Author Aims for Parole Soon.”
And finally, there’s this.
The film ends with a summary of the accomplishments of graduates the Masonic Home, in medicine, sports, and the military, followed by this title card: “For more than a century, the Masonic Home in Fort Worth, Texas, took in thousands of children from all walks of life. They were fed, clothed, and educated by its extraordinary teachers, coaches, and administrators. Rusty and Juanita Russell served the home for 16 years, and their legacy lived strong until its closing in 2005.”
Why did the Masonic Home close in 2005? The school’s financial problems were, in part, due to a $6.9-million settlement for alleged sexual abuse charges against the school’s staff, dating back to the 1970s, hardly a fact the filmmakers could have missed.
To be sure, both inspiring and abusive guardians can exist within the same institution at different times. But the film’s blanket boosterism bears a disturbing resemblance to a whitewash.
12 Mighty Orphans. Directed by Ty Roberts. Written by Roberts, Lane Garrison and Kevin Meyer, based on the book by Jim Dent. Starring Luke Wilson, Vinessa Shaw, Martin Sheen, Wayne Knight, Jake Austin Walker and Robert Duvall. Opens theatrically August 6.