The press release for The Long Game announced: “The Long Game will be screened on April 9, 2024, at the White House, as part of the efforts of the Biden-Harris Administration to continue engaging with the Latino community.” But the film itself isn’t so succinct. Directed and co-written by Julio Quintana, The Long Game exploits easy sentimentality to gain political advantage.
Quintana doesn’t ask for much in this replay of real-life ethnic struggle. He goes back to 1956, when five youths from Del Rio, Texas, were coached by school superintendent JB Peña (Jay Hernandez), a WWII veteran and golf enthusiast familiar with racial difficulty and committed to social pursuits. Urging his charges to become the San Felipe High School Mustangs team, he helps them break the color bar of the local whites-only country club and eventually win the 16th annual Monte Cristo tournament. (Their achievement is recounted in Humberto G. Garcia’s book Mustang Miracle, but the film’s title refers to players with power, perseverance, and accuracy.)
It’s a good-enough true story of American social progress, similar to Terrence Howard’s swimming-pool integration film Pride, but Quintana’s filmmaking is so slick (as fake-looking as in that over-the-top ethnic thrill ride Crazy Rich Asians) that it easily plays into the Biden administration’s divisive race tactics. Quintana obliges the Left’s repetition of past prejudice — the affronts that Mexican Americans endured while striving to enter the white-dominated world of 1950s professional golfing create wounds that never heal.
But suppose this movie told the life story of Texas-born Latino golf champion Lee Trevino, who won the U.S. Open in 1968 — and who furthered his legend in Adam Sandler’s 1996 golf epic Happy Gilmore, a great American success story? Instead, Quintana thinks small, recalling the lesser-known Lupe Felan (José Julián), Felipe Romero (Miguel Angel Garcia), Mario Lomas (Christian Gallegos), Gene Vasquez (Gregory Diaz IV), and Joe Trevino (Julian Works). Peña’s boys first worked as caddies and then, stopped by bigots with Joe Manchin good-old-boy mugs, had to practice golf on their own makeshift course in the local rough mesquite patches. Peña, aided by his white WWII veteran buddy Frank Mitchell (Dennis Quaid), steps in to gain them admission to the country club.
No doubt those men deserve to be remembered, but here’s a hard cultural fact: The obscure Mustangs golf legend is outweighed by movie history, Cheech Marin’s scene-stealing performance as a Latino golf caddy named Romeo Posar in Rob Shelton’s 1996 Tin Cup , in which Marin out-acted the pro golfers played by Kevin Costner and Don Johnson. (It was Shelton and Marin’s prescient anticipation of Will Smith’s overly humble, magical-Negro race stereotyping in The Legend of Bagger Vance.)
Marin’s performance made up for years of Latino diminishment in Hollywood. Quintana’s attractive young actors can’t match that breakthrough. Prone to up-talking like Millennial gringos, displaying no spirituality or religious foundation, they lack the reserve of ethnic dignity that actors from Katy Jurado and Ricardo Montalbán to Cantinflas once projected, squeezing pride into their Hollywood roles. Hernandez plus Oscar Nuñez as Peña’s accommodating Board of Education colleagues also display this extra gravitas. But Cheech Marin as Pollo, the country club’s groundskeeper, tells a richer tale. Marin brings tough love and ethnic wisdom to this mascot role. Wearing wire-mesh gear over his head and chest to protect him from errant golf balls, Pollo tells the youngsters, “I never take off my cage; it’s my invisibility suit. They don’t respect you, but at least they can’t hurt you.”
Marin’s performance comes down to earth after his fabled Cheech and Chong reefer-comedy act and helps outline the difficulty of social crossover. It’s the counterpoint to Peña’s self-conscious rules. (“Tuck your shirt in. No shorts. I don’t want to hear Spanish on the course ever. We have to look and act like we belong here.”) Pollo teaches reality to the young Mustangs when he asks, “You serious? Good. Then you’re the ones I’ve been waiting for.” And he bestows upon them his secret stash of premium country-club equipment.
That moment sustains the legacy of ethnic survival, the standards and benefits that one generation passes to the next. The Long Game offers predictable, banal uplift, never at the level of 42, Brian Helgeland’s 2013 film about Jackie Robinson. Still, Marin’s Pollo avoids the smug resentment in Ava DuVernay’s Bidenesque tales (Origin, When They See Us), in which ethnic identity is served up as a Democratic campaign ploy.
Some black and brown filmmakers are eager to fit in with their exploiters. The Long Game follows that routine. So it was given a special screening in Biden’s White House — it’s a useful tool for dividing Americans by racial identity. This separatism perverts the mid-20th-century struggle for recognition merely to revive memories of injustice and attitudes of resentment about the inequality that has largely been overcome. The long political game in Hollywood and D.C. denies that freedom.