By 1968, a cresting wave
of international youth unrest reached the campuses of the Ivy League, where
Vietnam War protests and student strikes became increasingly commonplace. Yet
on Saturday afternoons, hippies huddled with vets on the football field and in
the stands, to represent their schools. At Harvard, Al Gore cheered on his
roommate Tommy Lee Jones, one of the team's guards. Over at Yale, George W.
Bush pulled for his roomie, and Meryl Streep sometimes showed up to root for her
Yale boyfriend. And in the Yale newspaper, cartoonist Garry Trudeau poked fun
at the whole phenomenon of football-worship, using Yale's quarterback Brian
Dowling as the model for the overconfident "B.D."—a character still
featured in Trudeau's Doonesbury today.
Kevin Rafferty's generally
entertaining, intermittently exciting documentary Harvard Beats Yale 29-29 drops the names of all
those now-famous people, even featuring an interview with Tommy Lee Jones. It
also touches on the tumultuous times, while recalling one phenomenal game
played between the two old rivals in '68. But because few file photos and
little archival footage were available to flesh out the larger world this game
took place in—and there's no narrator to streamline the story—Harvard
Beats Yale
lacks a necessary drive and ambition. Rafferty keeps the structure too simple,
relying on lengthy excerpts from the game telecast, between players'
reminiscences—which results in a lot of repetition.
Of course, it helps that
Rafferty (a Harvard man) has a wild, unpredictable game to recount, with a
heart-stopping ending. Much like the recent "remember when" documentary Man
On Wire, Harvard
Beats Yale 29-29
builds strong momentum in its home stretch, and sends the audience out on a
high. But also like Man On Wire, Harvard Beats Yale takes its own
significance as innate, and rarely strives to be anything more than one long
anecdote. It's good to meet these men and hear their stories, and get some
sense of what it was like to go to school at two of America's enduring
institutions during a time when the aristocracy was out of favor. It's only a
sense, though, not a deeper understanding.