Screen: Epic Match Media

One of the things I love best about 31 Films In 31 Days is the subpatterns that emerge.

I had a little Anna Kendrick subpattern going a few days ago with Happy Christmas and Into The Woods back to back; in today’s entry, Shenandoah, one of the high-school football players charged in the murder of Luis Ramirez, isn’t welcome on the squad anymore during his wait for trial, so he joins the winter musical as one of the princes in…Into The Woods.

That player, Brian Scully, is the only one of those charged who participated in Shenandoah, and he’s an interesting subject. (That’s not him above; that’s a flag-squad dude the football players tend to pick on.) Scully and three other players — princes already of a small town hit hard by the recession and the death of the local mines, where the gridiron squad is entertainment and identity for the whole community — got into a drunk altercation with Ramirez late one night and beat him to death while yelling racial slurs and telling Ramirez to “speak English.” Local PD’s coverup almost worked, but Ramirez’s girlfriend Crystal called in a Latino defense fund, who got the FBI involved. Not that that stopped a local jury from clearing the kids on almost all counts, but in the end, almost everyone got some time, including Scully, who’s on house arrest. Scully doesn’t seem to get it at first; the reveal of what actually went down, who’s involved, and what’s at stake is something of a slow build, and Scully narrates his part in it without much affect. “I went to kick him in the head, and I missed” is one typical flatly disturbing line. He also sighs that his football coach, who turned him off the team, should have “been there for” him more.

His parents, meanwhile, definitely don’t get it. We first meet his mother, Julie, when she’s weeping about “the torment that we’ve had” about Ramirez’s death — not that a man died, or that she raised the kind of young man who would shit-kick another person to death because he had the temerity to yell at Scully in Spanish. Their torment. Later, she’s reading a statement (I think) she’s planning to give to the court in support of her son, and the “some of his best friends are African-American” claim is bad enough, but she doesn’t use that term. “Colored boy” is what she says. Julie: don’t help.

But it feels as the movie unspools like Scully is starting to understand what went wrong here. Asked if he’d have gotten into it with someone who was hassling him in English, he says it wouldn’t have gotten that far if he’d understood the word “stop,” and of course that’s laughable; you don’t need to know the word for “stop” to know a guy who’s on the ground getting kicked by you and the rest of the defensive line that he’s probably signaling you to cut that out. But you can kind of see Scully realizing that himself, as he’s talking.

Shenandoah is solid despite some laziness in the construction (the visit to Ramirez’s hometown in Mexico drags, enough that you notice the cheesy Zorro music cues), and the timeline’s a bit foggy as to when the filmmakers got into the story, but said story is good enough — and mixed in with enough effective interviews with local peeps like Eileen, a retired Philly police officer who grouses that, if she hadn’t witnessed the incident, the Shenandoah PD would probably have dumped Ramirez’s body somewhere and had that be the end of it — that it’s worth a look.

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