FILM COMMENT : And, Hey, It’s OK to Lose : Today’s new-style movie-- ‘Cool Runnings,’ ‘Rudy’ and ‘Searching for Bobby Fischer’--exalts the ordinary guy, especially if he’s pure of heart

In “Cool Runnings,” a Jamaican bobsled team against all odds makes it to the ’88 Winter Olympics and then crashes on its final run. “Rudy” is about a pint-sized human tackling dummy, Daniel E. (Rudy) Ruettiger, who spends the entire movie prepping to play for his beloved Notre Dame varsity football team--which he finally does for a grand total of 27 seconds. “Searching for Bobby Fischer” is about a young chess whiz who makes it to the national championship and then, victory in sight, offers a friendly draw to his adversary.

What’s unusual about these films, all based on true stories, is that they are all meant to be uplifting, inspirational. They’re ostensibly about winning but the winning isn’t really winning--it’s winning as a way of Becoming a Better Person. Winning for the sake of winning--for its sheer lusty acquisitive power--has about as high a rep right now as junk bonds. The greed-is-good ‘80s have had a chastening effect on Hollywood’s standard victory scenario. Win-win has become a no-no.

The culture of winning has always been with us but it took the Reagan-Bush era to codify it into a creed. With the backwash to that era and the upturn of recession came a curious kind of moralizing in the movie arena.

You could first spot it a couple of years back with movies like “Regarding Henry” and “The Doctor” and even “Hook”--that whole weepie cycle of movies about high-level professionals downgraded by fate in order to discover their true humanity (and their families). This humanity often assumed trendy child-within trappings.

But these movies were still manifestly about adults--specifically male overachievers in an underachieving society. For these guys--shellshocked yuppies all--it was too late to pretend they had no stake in a mercenary culture; that’s why, in order to reclaim their innocence, they had to reach all the way back to childhood.

The new cycle of “winning” movies dispenses with the adult-child and replaces him with the real thing. They are primarily about children or young adults--those not yet tainted by true adulthood. The parents and adults in these films--generally fathers or father-figure coaches--are for the most part still entrenched in the old order; they still think winning-for-the-sake-of-winning is the way to go, or else they have lost their dreams, and it’s the children, the boy-men, who must teach them otherwise.

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Typically the one-in-a-million achievements of the young adults in these films are made to seem of no “practical” value in a mercenary society. An Olympic medal for bobsledding, a chess trophy, a few sprints on Knute Rockne Field--these don’t have the heft of, say, winning a corporate takeover. That’s the point. These rewards don’t make you rich, they just make you a better person.

The “Cool Runnings” bobsledders don’t cash in their notoriety, though the real-life bobsledders, with their T-shirts and product endorsements, certainly did. Josh the chess whiz, touted as “the next Bobby Fischer,” doesn’t entertain a future of multimillion-dollar tournament fees, as the real Bobby Fischer did. Rudy Ruettiger is content to have his 27 seconds of fame, though the real Rudy apparently spent most of the past 17 years trying to get a movie made about his life and is now on the motivational-speaker lecture circuit.

The adolescent framework for these films reinforces the classic adolescent notion that, for these young heroes, adulthood will never come. The sell-out will never come because they have nothing to sell; they’re “clean.” In most of these movies it’s the fathers--the men indoctrinated in the win-win culture--who must learn the value of goodness from their children. The wealthy patriarch of one of the bobsledders can’t understand why his son might turn down a fancy job in a law firm to compete in the Olympics (and follow his own dream). Rudy’s father, a steel-mill foreman, is dumbfounded by his boy’s decision to quit the mill and chase after his fantasy of playing for Notre Dame. Josh’s dad is more keyed into Josh’s victories than Josh is; his coach wants him to show total disdain for his opponents.

In each instance, the fathers have their moment of truth when they recognize their son’s truth and are converted. It’s practically a religious experience. The implication is that the next generation will erase the errors of their dad’s generation (and rehabilitate the patriarchs in the process). The ‘90s won’t be like the ‘80s because greed is out and “good character” is in.

Women barely figure in these movies at all because, in popular culture, women are not considered power players, so what power could they possibly have abused? When they figure at all it’s usually in the traditional nurturing mode: It’s Josh’s mother who sees into her boy’s essential goodness and hollers when the men try to turn him into a cut-throat competitor. The irony is that, in contrast to the male arena, where powermongering is currently under attack, the new push in feminism is all about power--about winning. Though you’d never guess at this from most Hollywood movies. Practically the only powerful females on screen this year were the dinosaurs in “Jurassic Park.”

We’ve always had a problem with winners in America. We celebrate superiority and yet we recoil from elitism. That’s why, particularly in periods of recession, the winners are usually the underdogs--they satisfy our desire to see winners with whom we can identify. With a movie like “Dave,” we had perhaps our first Clinton-era winner. Dave, who accidentally “becomes” President of the United States when the real President, his double, dies, is a regular guy whose very regularness makes him the perfect leader. His decency brings him palpable power, and he is not corrupted by it.

What “Dave” and the current new-style winner movies are saying is that we can only accept winners who are pure in heart. They must be intensely likable . And their likability is offered in narrow, sanctimonious, middle-class terms. That’s why all these movies are crammed with little life-lesson sermonettes about the importance of hard work and good family and good values. They’re intended as character builders.

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Despite their ecumenical tone these films have their pasteboard villains, like the bad seed automaton who squares off against Josh in the chess finals, or the racist East German bobsledders in “Cool Runnings.” In their own sneaky way, these movies are as drenched in the cult of winning as the rah-rah films they supposedly subvert. They tell you that if you’re good you’ll win out in the end. Maybe somebody will even make a movie about you. “Searching for Bobby Fischer” keeps pointing up how it’s not really about winning and yet the whole film is geared up for us to want to see little Josh win his big match. “Rudy” shows us our 27-second hero being carried off the field on the shoulders of his teammates but the postscript at the end of the movie doesn’t satisfy our curiosity by telling us anything more about him than that he graduated Notre Dame in 1976. Did the filmmakers think they would spoil our bliss by filling us in on his unstellar aftermath? If we’re celebrating a regular guy, why be ashamed of his regular life?

In the new-style winner movie, the ordinary is exalted. Rudy, with only the barest of athletic or academic skills, makes it into Notre Dame and onto the varsity playing field. The Jamaican bobsledders, who never pushed a bobsled and never saw snow, make it to the Winter Olympics. But the extraordinary in these movies is also conventionalized and brought down to manageable size. Josh is celebrated not so much for his chess genius but the goodness of heart that allows him to be a regular kid despite his gift. Like the boy whiz in “Little Man Tate,” the filmmakers have made him palatable by diminishing him--by making him seem to be one of us.

In their desire to show us “regular” heroes--Everywinners--these movies fail to characterize what’s special about them. All the rough edges are beveled. “Cool Runnings” is pitched for the kiddies; the bobsledders are cute kiddie cut-ups. Everything about Rudy is skewed toward the inspirational; there’s no psychological underpinning to him, no real mania or anger or guile. So, too, with Josh, who, of course, is angelic; his obsession with chess doesn’t even seem like an obsession. That would be in bad taste.

These ordinary extraordinary people--or is it extraordinary ordinary people?--are linked by their common decency in pursuit of their dreams. But none of them emerge as full-fledged characters because they’re too busy being likable. It’s understandable that there would be this reaction to the Me Decade of the ‘80s but do we really need all this soporific sentimentality? It’s enough to make you want to rush out and rent a Jack Nicholson movie. Besides, shouldn’t we be awfully suspicious of any message coming out of Hollywood telling us the pure-in-heart are the real winners?