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DVD review: The Long Game [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2025-02-19

Doubt golf cheat Donald Trump will be watching this golf movie. Or if he does, he still won’t learn anything from it. Not about golf, not about life, not about anything. Maybe he won’t watch the other movie with the same title (2024), but for different reasons.

The Long Game (2023) is based on a true story, at least according to the box, but the end credits say the movie “is a work of fiction.” It’s about real people, but one of the good guys is fictional, and you will be able to tell, near the end of the movie if not sooner, because you won’t see him in the cards telling you what happened to these people after the events depicted in the movie.

JB Peña really did form a golf team of American high school students of Mexican ancestry in Texas and got them into golf tournaments in the late 1950s. The movie makes it quite clear that these boys are Americans, with one scene in which they go to a bar in Mexico and fail to pass for locals.

JB Peña (Jay Hernandez) tries to get service for his team at a diner.

Peña was a World War II veteran of the U. S. Army, seriously injured on a mission that the movie tells us he was not expected to survive. As in, if it had been a squadron of white soldiers, they would have been asked to volunteer for the mission, not ordered.

That part about World War II is in the backstory of the movie. Even though you can look up what happens to the various real people of the story, I will try to not give spoilers about the end of the movie. But I will give a very detailed recap of what happens in Act I, so you can get a sense of where the movie is going.

The movie starts out in Del Rio in 1956. JB Peña (Jay Hernandez) is now a school superintendent and frustrated golfer. His wife Lucy (Jaina Lee Ortiz) is also a very good golfer. They don’t have children, but they want to. He also wants them to play at a prestigious club, and presumably he can afford the membership fee. But he’s simply not allowed to join, for a reason everyone knows but no one wants to articulate or feels the need to articulate.

Brett Cullen puts on a Southern accent for his rôle as Judge Cox, the kind of Southern accent that immediately tells you the character is one racist evil bastard. Judge Cox is all for the rule of law… as long as the law supports systemic racism and does not challenge the status quo. Judge Cox is a member at the club and its de facto president.

Peña is driving to the school one day when a golf ball smashes into his car and hits his head. Thus Superintendent Peña discovers that five young golf caddies have been working on building their own golf course, since they can’t play on the golf course where they caddy at. It turns out the boys attend San Felipe High School, which is where Peña was headed.

Daniella Torres (Paulina Chávez, right) points something out to Joe Treviño (Julian Works) in a scene from The Long Game (2023).

Peña has an idea: the boys will form a golf team and compete in tournaments. The boys will take this offer because the alternative is to mow his lawn. But the best golfer of the lot of them, Joe Treviño (Julian Works), is also very moody, even for a teenage boy, and unwilling to join the team at first.

Peña also ropes in golf great and former war comrade Frank Mitchell (Dennis Quaid) to coach the boys. The boys are good, but they’re also undisciplined. It doesn’t take much convincing to get Mitchell to agree to polish these diamonds in the rough.

They practice at the makeshift golf course in the afternoons, and at the actual golf course at night, as Groundskeeper Pollo (Cheech Marin) agrees to look the other way.

At their first tournament, the boys place fifth. They’re actually very happy about this, and they should be. I’m not sure how far away the tournament is from Del Rio. It’s far away enough that they stop to eat at a diner they would not normally eat at.

So they sit at a table but no one comes take their order. Peña goes to the counter and very reasonably tries to get service. Treviño thinks Peña is wasting his breath. So the boy goes outside the diner to tee up a golf ball and use it to smash one of the diner’s windows.

Mitchell endorses this action, criticizing only the technique, but Peña is furious. This act of vandalism only serves to confirm some of the worst stereotypes about boys like Treviño. Don’t be surprised if this incident comes back to haunt them near the end of the movie.

Pollo (Cheech Marin) does out some elderly wisdom in a scene from The Long Game (2023).

The San Felipe High School golf team makes the news. There’s a girl at the school whom Treviño has a crush on, but she didn’t really give him the time of day. But now, Daniella Torres (Paulina Chávez) wants to know Treviño better. They go on a little date and she confides in him her dreams for the future: she writes short stories and wants to publish a novel. No one in Del Rio has ever published a book.

There are only two futures for the boys who graduate San Felipe High. As Peña puts it, they can be caddies or they can be cannon fodder. The Junior ROTC program at San Felipe seems to have existed as long as the high school has been around, and a boy’s choice after graduation seems to be limited to which branch of the U. S. Armed Forces to enlist in.

Pollo, a World War I veteran and now the groundskeeper at the golf club Peña is not allowed to join, represents the likeliest future for the boys of the golf team if they don’t continue playing in tournaments.

I rate the movie ★★★★★. The story is interesting, it is told in a straight line, and more importantly we are made to care about these boys and what happens to them.

The cinematography is good, and the shots of the various characters putting are far more energetic than anything you’ll see in an actual golf tournament on TV.

Coach Frank Mitchell (Dennis Quaid) is disappointed but not surprised by what just happened.

I do wish some of the shots were brighter in color. If you compare each of the screenshots I’ve posted in this article to the actual movie, you will find the actual movie quite dull in color. It’s like every daytime or indoor shot has to have a dull gray layer over it. But I’m not gonna shave anything significant off the star rating for that, it might be one of those things that I might be more sensitive to than most moviegoers.

We should also acknowledge that the movie fails the Bechdel test. There are two named women, and a girl, but they really have no reason to talk to each other about anything besides golf and the men and boys in their lives. But given how this is based on a true story, albeit fictionalized, the writers did not have the flexibility to write dialogue for the women that feels organic and advances the plot.

Although most DVDs don’t come with special features these days, I still deduct a star when the DVD doesn’t have any special features, giving it ★★★★☆. A little making of featurette and one or two short interviews with professional golfers like Al Espinosa or Nancy Lopez would have been nice.

By the way, Nancy Lopez is a retired golf champion who now has her own line of women’s golf apparel and equipment.

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