Category: Arts

Attending a high school that didn’t have its own sports teams, my concept of cheerleaders mostly came from what I saw on TV. White, pretty, mean. They cheered to make themselves popular or to date football players.

The recent Netflix miniseries “Cheer” flips all those stereotypes on their heads.

“Cheer” follows the real-life cheerleading team at Navarro College, a community college in rural Texas. The show’s arc juxtaposes two common sports movie tropes that aren’t normally seen together — the dominant juggernaut with a deep-seated desire to win and the scrappy, diverse underdogs who play above their means. The opening makes it clear that Navarro is a dominant force in the world of cheerleading and that their driven coach, Monica, will accept nothing less than another national title.

But these aren’t your typical teen sitcom cheerleaders. Many of Navarro’s cheerleaders are minorities or from low-income backgrounds. For some of them, cheerleading is literally all they have, and it’s that — the undeniably human stories of these athletes overcoming what life has thrown at them to come together and create something bigger than themselves — that makes the most compelling part of the show.

This show is not always pretty. Monica’s tactics occasionally border on abusive. There are a lot of injuries, and many of them are not handled properly. (It’s unclear if this is due to lack of adequate athletic medicine resources, negligence from coaches or both.) This is the dark underbelly of many sports, and “Cheer” presents it right alongside the feel-good narratives and lets you decide for yourself what you think. That was one of the more fascinating aspects of the show for me, especially as someone who is frequently around sports.

The show centers primarily on five protagonists — Lexi, Morgan, LaDarius, Jerry and Gabi — as they prepare for nationals with their team. All five are easy to root for. They all had different hopes and dreams and as the show reached its conclusion, I found myself cheering for them all to find success in their own ways. Throughout the documentary, you see a lot of footage from practice and information on how Navarro’s routine is coming, but you also get to hear the backstory of these five and see the impact that being part of the team has had in their lives.

I found out two episodes into “Cheer” that Navarro is one of only two teams in its division. Trinity Valley, the school it mentions as Navarro’s biggest rival, is in fact its only rival. The miniseries conceals this fact, but somehow it didn’t bother me as much as I thought it would. As the series went on, I found myself wondering more what would happen to each of the main team members rather than whether Navarro would win its championship. For that reason, I appreciated that “Cheer” doesn’t end with Navarro’s nationals performance. Instead, it goes on to show what happened to everyone after they walked off the stage — and not everything wraps up in a neat little bow.

“Cheer” is sports documentary meets sports movie, a David and Goliath story at the same time. Not everything is as glitzy and glamorous as the cheerleaders I saw on TV as a kid. And those things are what make the show so compelling.

I’m a longtime fan of Jane Austen’s novel Emma. Did I secretly want it to be my favorite book because it has my name as the title? Yes. Did that lead me to read it when I was too young and couldn’t understand much of it? Uh huh. Have I finally gotten to the age where her storyline as an occasionally selfish and insensitive young woman resonates with me? Yep.

Let me start with how good a job I think Anya Taylor-Joy did as Emma. I grew up with the 1996 Gwyneth Paltrow version of Emma. Though as a 10, 12, 14-year old, I wouldn’t have told you I liked that movie from over the games on my first-gen iPod touch, between my parents on the couch, I have every second of it memorized. Paltrow completely is Emma in my mind. I worried that this would make it impossible for me to like Taylor-Joy in the movie. I worried for nothing.

I really appreciated how true to the character’s age she seemed. How young and my age. It made her fussiness more endearing and excusable. She wasn’t old enough for me to think she kept stubbornly messing up. I didn’t like as much how they portrayed Harriet’s youth, though. For the whole movie, I felt like she was putting on airs to seem younger and ditzier than I could quite believe. Yes, Harriet is supposed to be young and ditzy, but in this version, I was consistently a little uncomfortable with how undignified she was. I suppose she’s a hard character to nail…maybe it’s easier to concentrate on your cleverness as Emma than on your dippiness as Harriet. I can see how childishness is harder to fake than precociousness.

Comedy really set this version apart from the ’96 version. 2020 went much harder. Emma’s father, played by Bill Nighy, and Mr. Elton, played by Josh O’Connor, pulled most of the weight. I grew a little tired of Mr. Elton, but I loved Bill Nighy in this role–I’m so glad they got him! His tight-lipped, willowy kind of physical comedy always made me smile or laugh when he was on. I feel like it takes a special kind of actor to do very predictable, trite bits and still make everyone in the audience laugh, and it was never quiet in the theater when he was on screen.

I think it’s a hard thing to make Emma fans like a new version when they’ve liked others and feel close to the story. They succeeded with me. Now I want to try to speak for some people who didn’t know the story beforehand: they were not very clear about the nature of Mr. Knightley’s relationship with the family at the beginning (or anytime). In the novel, Austen explains that he is a neighbor-turned-close-family-friend who is 16 years older (yes) than Emma. The movie (and I extend this sin to the ’96 version, too, if I must) doesn’t give any of this context! He appears in the living room and everyone acts like friends.

For how long have they been friends? How old is Mr. Knightley? Has the father already thought of them together at all? More importantly:

Why hasn’t Emma see Mr. Knightley as a love interest earlier? It’s because she’s seen him only as a mentor her whole life, since childhood. Conversely, why hasn’t Mr. Knightley see her as a love interest earlier? Because she’s only just recently a woman and not a child. The movie never answers these.

Do I think the movie put a few more fingers in the comedy pot than it needed to? Yeah, I do. Do I think it should’ve worked harder to contextualize Emma’s and Mr. Knightley’s relationship? For sure. Did I enjoy this movie a lot? Yes. Should you go see it? Absolutely.