My favorite scene from The Bad News Bears involves the diminutive Lupus, memorably described by a teammate as a booger-eating moron. Lupus is playing in the outfield when a line drive rolls by him and hits the outfield wall. His teammates scream at him to throw the ball back to the infield. He picks the ball up, but poor Lupus cannot throw it. His arm extends high over his head and the ball somehow goes backward. Again and again. Despite 30 years of movie clichés about lovable losers who start off bad and get good, the sight of poor Lupus remains a signature (and hilarious) image of pure futility.
With a disappointing remake of the The Bad News Bears now in theaters, the 1976 original has been making the rounds on cable lately. It hasn't lost its sting. The plot is simple: ex-minor leaguer Morris Buttermaker reluctantly agrees to coach the Bears, an ethnically mixed collection of Little League misfits who can't play an ounce of ball. Buttermaker brings in two ringers—fireball pitcher Amanda Whurlitzer, the daughter of an ex-girlfriend; and Kelly Leak, the local punk who carries on like he's 30 and can hit the ball a mile—and suddenly the Bears become contenders.
As embodied by Walter Matthau, Buttermaker is a brilliant creation, a foul-mouthed, caustic washout. Though he inevitably warms to the kids by the end, he is for the most part an unapologetic drunk, and Matthau wears him like an old bathrobe.
Despite Billy Bob Thornton's effortlessly letchy performance as the 2005 Buttermaker, the new film is a by-the-numbers retread of the original. Since director Richard Linklater is unwilling to change up the story, he is stuck going through the motions with an uninspiring cast. Gone is spunky Tatum O'Neal. There's no pint-sized bad-ass Jackie Earle Haley, who looked like a wuss but projected such steely self-regard that you bought him as a kid you wouldn't want to mess with. (The new version, Jeff Davies II, is just a wuss.)
What's always been most captivating about The Bad News Bears is its portrait of American suburbia. Full of Denny's and Pizza Huts, Chico's Bail Bonds and air hockey joints, it's neither presented as a bucolic utopia nor as a static graveyard of Stepford children. It is multi-ethnic, middle-class, ragged and real. The Bears already have a sense that the world sort of sucks, that the adults looking after them are hypocrites or fools; they even have a sense of themselves as more or less doomed to follow suit, and yet they have that resiliency of kids, to not take anything too seriously and to recognize and respond to BS when they see it—even their own.
The film's largely unsentimental view of childhood is matched by its examination of the culture's mixed signals about competition. To ensure the Bears make it to the championship game, Buttermaker instructs one of his players, who is a weak batter, to lean in over the plate and get hit by a pitch so he can get on base. Buttermaker also orders Leak to catch every ball he can in the outfield, even when it means dashing in front of a teammate to make the play. The kids give Leak the cold shoulder and yet (and the kids know this), Leak's entire presence on the team is a cheat. So why not let him shag some extra fly balls?
Buttermaker's foe is the coach of the Bears' rival team, the Yankees. In the remake, Greg Kinnear plays the Yankees' coach as smarmy and stuck up; the running joke is that he wears his athletic pants so tight that his balls are visible. One can't imagine Vic Morrow, who plays the same character in the original, ever making such a sophomoric mistake about his sportswear. Morrow's Roy Turner is a better rival for Buttermaker: a man's man who strives to indoctrinate in his players a code of masculinity that is equal parts power and honor, what we could call gentlemanly domination.
Turner and Buttermaker hate each other—the former is Establishment, the latter would tell you to go to hell—but both want to win, and both are willing to use the kids to do it. When Turner orders his son, Joey, the team's pitcher, to intentionally walk a hitter, the boy balks, and in protest, tries to bean the batter. Turner charges the mound in righteous fury, berates his son for his unethical conduct, and hits him. To Turner, there's a huge moral difference between the intentional walk and the brush back—do what it takes to win but do it honorably. To Joey both acts are the same; they sabotage the joy of trying to win on your own terms.
The film is not naïve enough to peddle the old Winning Isn't Everything line. One look at the shaggy Bears and you realize that winning is almost always better than losing. After Turner's outburst, Buttermaker has a change of heart, benching Amanda (whose arm is sore) and putting in scrubs who haven't played all season. But the kids regard him with some suspicion, essentially asking, "Why are you sabotaging things now? We have a chance to win." And the audience wonders much the same thing. Yes, play all the kids, sure, but let's wait until next summer's season opener, eh?
The Bears come up just short in the final game; the film's use of music from Bizet's opera Carmen is both stirring and self-mocking, equal parts comedy and tragedy. With beers in hand, the Bears don't take defeat with quiet good manners. They're pissed that they lost. Whatever warmth they can take from the moral victory of playing like a team is nothing compared to the heat they feel when they tell the Yankees they'll kick their ass next season. The un-Hollywood ending is more moderate than it seems, squarely in the anti-authoritarian mode of flipping the bird to the powers that be (think Cool Hand Luke or One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest). In the end, the film reveals, the Bears are not entirely losers. Rather, they are real Americans: They want only to win and they're willing to bend the rules, but they aren't willing to become assholes.