There are a number of once-popular genres and subgenres that have been absorbed – hopefully temporarily – into larger corporate concerns in 2023: Comedies subsumed by “funny” superhero movies, adult dramas translated into overlong ten-episode prestige TV, rom-coms converted into not-quite-cinema streaming content. It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that the underdog sports picture currently exists primarily within the framework of faith-based movies, taking a movie type already prone to sentimental clichés and further flattening it into the product of prayer and constancy. By comparison, Rudy, an underdog sports movie from 30 years ago that features not one but two Catholic institutions and has its hero praying multiple times to receive permissions to transfer from one to the other, looks positively secular. Despite that prayer, despite a kindly priest played by Robert Prosky, Rudy is very nearly an inspirational procedural, a study in real-life pipsqueak Rudy Ruettiger (Sean Astin) focusing all of his energy on a largely symbolic goal with no material reward: To play college football for Notre Dame, if only for a few minutes of a single game.
What Rudy shares with its more pious descendants is a single-mindedness. Though Ruettiger comes from the requisite modest background, one of countless siblings in a blue-collar family that prizes Notre Dame football while possessing a perverse blue-collar pride in not sending its kids off to college, he’s not a hidden prodigy. He doesn’t get good grades, and his presence on the high school football team is largely ceremonial. In the movie’s telling, he takes a kind of Depression-era hobo approach, essentially showing up on campus with a bindle and gaining admittance to sibling school Holy Cross by gentleman’s agreement, sans housing. (Eventually he starts sleeping on a cot in a groundskeeper’s office, though it’s not explained where he’s been laying his head before then, if anywhere.)
Put a better way: He’s five foot nothin’, a hundred and nothin’, with barely a speck of athletic ability. That’s how the Notre Dame groundskeeper Fortune (Charles S. Dutton) describes him late in the film, in what would be its most memorable moment if not for the big inspirational ending and the swell of Jerry Goldsmith’s score. (Even if you haven’t seen the movie, you probably know its theme music, which was repurposed in many trailers. It’s terrific.) Dutton is supposedly playing a composite character, and in the hands of a lesser performer, I’d be talking about a composite of “bull” and “shit.” But the Dutton scenes make you snap to attention, maybe moreso 30 years later, given how scarce his presence has been in films over the past decade. (He appears to be retired, and incidentally, his real-life biography is a greater triumph-over-the-odds story than Ruettiger’s; during a prison sentence, he got turned on to the performing arts, started a prison drama group, got his GED and associate’s degree, then went on to graduate from multiple acting programs following his parole, leading to an early-career Tony nom and eventually his own sitcom.)
Dutton has the most immediate presence of any actor in Rudy. He’s introduced in a distant long shot – his whole first scene plays out with Rudy in the foreground and Fortune in the distance, his voice carrying across the empty football stadium – and that big late-movie speech telling Rudy he’ll regret quitting the team happens mostly in a medium. Director David Anspaugh uses closer shots in certain key moments, but he appears to trust how commanding Dutton seems without them.
To the movie’s credit, it’s not about Fortune mentoring Rudy, who becomes his assistant. Fortune simply puts the kid to work, granting him some symbolic and literal terra firma, and providing that late-movie dressing-down when he needs it. Rudy is very much not about Rudy becoming a better football player, but about repeatedly demonstrating what so many friends and coaches and various unconventional authority figures describe as his heart. The heart-forward approach is just shy of insufferable, which also describes Astin’s performance. It functions either as an object lesson of his ill-suitedness for major leading-man stardom, or a clever use of his gift for false-modesty diffidence to portray a realistic streak of little-guy smarm in Ruettiger, who – for all his supposedly humility – does sometimes come across as a nagging irritant who allows himself to be possessed by an all-consuming act of, essentially, fandom. Nascent scenes of Astin and his older buddy D-Bob (Jon Favreau) attempting to chat up various campus gals now serve as a reminder of how Favreau wrote and starred in a better and funnier portrait of young guys on the make with Swingers, a few years later. (If that seems like an odd thing to consider during Rudy, Favreau’s Swingers co-star Vince Vaughn appears here too, though the future on-screen buddies don’t share any scenes.) Of course, it’s probably not easy to connect romantically with women when you don’t have any discernible interests beyond your own big-hearted dream.
Maybe I’m being a little too hard on ol’ Rudy; Dutton’s mini-monologue addresses most of those concerns, reminding him that the actual fruits of his labor include a degree from a prestigious university, which will outlast his fleeting glory (and, though Fortune doesn’t mention it directly, helps him identify and work with his previously undiagnosed dyslexia). I’m sure this resonated with my Notre Dame alum dad, who took me to see the movie back in 1993, and liked to pontificate on how academic and athletic achievement didn’t need to be mutually exclusive. Moreover, the other major college-football movie of fall 1993, The Program, became best-known for its scene where several team members lie down in the middle of a busy street as a daredevil stunt, inspiring copycats with at least one fatality. Though the scene was subsequently removed from the film, Rudy surely comes out ahead for not inspiring anyone to play in traffic.
Indeed, the movie’s end crawl notes that several of Rudy’s siblings followed his lead into higher education – though it doesn’t mention the degree to which the real-life Ruettiger apparently endeavored to prolong that fleeting glory through a motivational speaking career. Doubtless a feature film, prepackaged as the underdog favorite of 1993, further enhanced that career. These are the push-pull nags that three decades add to Rudy in a way that hasn’t quite happened with its unofficial predecessor Hoosiers, with which it shares a writer, director and Indiana backdrop. In a way, this (mostly) modest and (often) charming sports-underdog picture paved the way for the faith-based versions that would eventually replace it; ultimately Rudy, like its hero, its primarily interested in its own unflagging belief.
Jesse Hassenger is associate movies editor at Paste. He also writes about movies and other pop-culture stuff for a bunch of outlets including Polygon, Inside Hook, Vulture, and SportsAlcohol.com, where he also has a podcast. Following @rockmarooned on Twitter is a great way to find out about what he’s watching or listening to, and which terrifying flavor of Mountain Dew he has most recently consumed.