*½/****
directed by Kenneth A. Carlson
by Walter Chaw Although it starts out well enough and detours in the middle with a vaguely interesting, if too-brief, look at how it must be for intellectuals to live in a place like Massillon, OH, Kenneth A. Carlson's documentary Go Tigers! is a repetitive and unenlightening piece whose attitude alternates between sympathy and scorn. The small town of Massillon, it seems, is obsessed with football–glimpses of other Ohio towns suggest that Massillon's fanatical fervour is perhaps the small-town Ohio norm. (Apocryphal tales suggest that Texas and Nebraska might be worse.) The revelation that rubes like their blood sports served rare is more than a trifle unsurprising; Go Tigers! very gradually amends our rooting for the high-school gridiron heroes to succeed, and we start to wish that the team bus would crash and save the world from a couple dozen illiterate, ill-bred, spoiled animals who dangerously reached their peak at the tender age of seventeen–er, nineteen.
The film is populated with the people of Massillon: old and young, demented (such as the town's peculiarly fey strength-coach) and deceptively sane (Ellery Moore, the team's star defensive end, has spent fifteen months in jail for rape), incoherent (Danny Studer, the coach's son and captain of the team whose howling pep talks boil down to obscene idioglossia), and dangerous (rocks through windows and death threats announce the eve of a big rivalry). Carlson pieces Go Tigers! together from endless game footage of the 1999 season, plus scenes of liquor binging and projectile vomiting and increasingly bizarre interviews with townsfolk and players. Garnering tension from a big game at the end of the season against competing burg McKinley, the film also introduces the spectre of a school district funding shortfall that, if not covered by a publicly approved mill levy, might spell the end of Massillon High's sports program.
The fact that almost everyone on the Massillon Tigers was held back a year in junior high so that they'd have an extra year to bulk up in high school stands in stark contrast to the school superintendent's repeated contention that a mill levy must be passed to preserve Massillon's proud educational tradition. Worse, the way that public opinion might fall in regards to the education vote most likely hinges on the outcome of the Tigers-McKinley matches. Go Tigers! is too long with too little to say, but it does do a good job of demonstrating what happens when a group of humans, isolated by and from occupation, education, and ambition, revert to the kind of tribalism that stunts cultural learning–and evolution. Go Tigers! can be seen as a caution against an entire American culture grown fat, brutal, and stupid on their own frugal repast of bread and circus. A sage caveat, no question, though one made once too often and perhaps ultimately unintentionally.
