Flashes of Panic

Last night, I finished watching Saint Ralph, a 2004 movie about a 14-year-old boy who decides he’s going to win the 1954 Boston Marathon because it will bring his mother out of a coma.

Reducing the plot to that one sentence makes it sound silly, but remember, we’re talking about a 14-year-old boy here, the least logical and rational sub-group of the human species. And Ralph actually makes a pretty good go of it, inadvertently finding a coach with Olympic credentials and discovering, through his own misunderstandings, a lot of solid truths about distance running. It’s as though he’s in the same room with every other marathoner, but he climbed through the window instead of coming in the door.

The not-so-subtle sub-plot is Ralph’s relationship with God. Ralph is a student at a Catholic school in Hamilton, Ontario, and his rationale for taking on the marathon is almost completely religious: He’s heard that it would take a miracle to bring his mother out of the coma. He’s told it would be a miracle if he could win Boston. So he figures, maybe that’s the miracle his mother needs, and he goes after it.

Like Life at These Speeds is not a running novel but not a novel about running, Saint Ralph is a movie about running, but not a running movie. It’s difficult to credit Ralph’s ungainly form and dramatic improvement from September to April. And the segments at the Boston Marathon are only Boston by name, as though they were filmed by someone who had heard stories of the Marathon but had never even seen pictures of the city or the course. (Some details are closer: the age of the marathon, the warmup in a churchyard, and even Ralph’s tune-up race, Hamilton’s Around the Bay, which still turns up on the biographies of serious Boston contenders. Boston is run on a Monday, though at that point Patriot’s Day was not tied to Mondays and the race could have been any day of the week.)

The big picture, though, is spot on. Ralph’s coach takes him on only if Ralph will promise to stop talking about miracles; instead, Ralph is put on a rigorous program of hard work, patience, and attention to detail. His coach shows him how to hook his lofty dreams to a plan, and where persistence and patience can go. And, of course, the old wisdom about how “God helps those who help themselves.” (Or, as Thomas Jefferson put it, “The harder I work, the more [luck] I have.”)

Lest one think the movie gets too heavy, though, God turns up at irregular intervals to give Ralph advice. He looks like Ralph’s father, but dressed as Santa Claus.

Now Playing: East of the Mountains from Songs for a Hurricane by Kris Delmhorst

Technorati Tags: Boston, marathon, running