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The Game of Their Lives
(DIRECTED BY DAVID ANSPAUGH; STARRING GERARD BUTTER, WES BENTLEY; 2005)
The Game of their Lives tells the story of an astonishing soccer match in 1950, when an unsung team of Americans went to Brazil to compete in the World Cup, and defeated England, the best team in the world. So extraordinary was the upset, I learn on the Internet Movie Database, “that London bookmakers offered odds of 500 to 1 against such an preposterous event, and the New York Times refused to run the score when it was first reported, deeming it a hoax.”
So it was a hell of an upset. Pity about the movie. Obviously made with all of the best will in the world, its heart in the right place, this is a sluggish and dutiful film that plays more like a eulogy than an adventure. Strange, how it follows the form of a sports movie but has the feeling of an educational film. And all the stranger because the director, David Anspaugh, has made two exhilarating movies about underdogs in sports, Hoosiers (1986) and Rudy (1993).
In those films he knew how to crank up the suspense and dramatize the supporting characters. Here it feels more like a group of Calvin Klein models have gathered to pose as soccer players from St. Louis. Shouldn’t there be at least one player not favored by nature with improbably good looks? And at least a couple who look like they’re around twenty, instead of thirty-five? And a goalie who doesn’t look exactly like Gerard Butler, who played The Phantom of the Opera? True, Frank Borghi, the goalie, is played by Gerard Butler, but that’s no excuse: In Dear Frankie, Butler played a perfectly believable character who didn’t look like he was posing for publicity photos.
The one personal subplot involves a player who thinks he can’t go to Brazil because it’s a conflict with his wedding day. Instead of milking this for personal conflict, Anspaugh solves it all in one perfunctory scene: The coach talks to the future father-in-law, the father-in-law talks to his daughter, she agrees to move up the wedding, and so no problem-o.
This team is so lackluster, when they go out to get drunk, they don’t get drunk. It’s 1950, but there’s only one cigarette and three cigars in the whole movie. The sound track could have used big band hits from the period, but William Ross’s score is so inspirational it belongs on a commercial.
As the movie opens, we see a St. Louis soccer club from a mostly Italian-American neighborhood, and hear a narration that sounds uncannily like an audiobook. Word comes that soccer players from New York will travel to Missouri, an American team will be chosen, and they’ll travel to Brazil. The players get this information from their coach, Bill Jeffrey (John Rhys-Davis), who is so uncoachlike that at no point during the entire movie does he give them one single word of advice about the game of soccer. Both Rhys-Davis and the general manager, Walter Giesler (Craig Hawksley), are perfectly convincing in their roles, but the screenplay gives them no dialogue to suggest their characters know much about soccer.
As for the big game itself, the game was allegedly shot on location in Brazil, but never do we get a sense that the fans in the long shots are actually watching the match. The tempo of the game is monotonous, coming down to one would-be British goal after another, all of them blocked by Borghi. This was obviously an amazing athletic feat, but you don’t get that sense in the movie. You don’t get the sense of soccer much at all; Bend It Like Beckham had better soccer—lots better soccer, and you could follow it and get involved.
At the end of the film, before a big modern soccer match, the surviving members of that 1950 team are called out onto the field and introduced. That should provide us with a big emotional boost, as we see the real men next to insets of their characters in the movie. But it doesn’t, because we never got to know the characters in the movie. The Game of Their Lives covers its story like an assignment, not like a mission.
The Girl Next Door
(DIRECTED BY LUKE GREENFIELD; STARRING EMILE HIRSCH, ELISHA CUTHBERT; 2004)
The studio should be ashamed of itself for advertising The Girl Next Door as a teenage comedy. It’s a nasty piece of business, involving a romance between a teenage porn actress and a high school senior. A good movie could presumably be made from this premise—a good movie can be made from anything, in the right hands and way—but this is a dishonest, quease-inducing “comedy” that had me feeling uneasy and then unclean. Who in the world read this script and thought it was acceptable?
The film stars Emile Hirsch as Matthew Kidman. (Please tell me the Kidman is not an oblique reference to Nicole Kidman and therefore to Tom Cruise and therefore to Risky Business, the film this one so desperately wants to resemble.) One day he sees a sexy girl moving in next door, and soon he’s watching through his bedroom window as she undresses as girls undress only in his dreams. Then she sees him, snaps off the light, and a few minutes later rings the doorbell.
Has she come to complain? No, she says nothing about the incident and introduces herself to Matthew’s parents: Her aunt is on vacation, and she is house-sitting. Soon they’re in her car together and Danielle is coming on to Matthew: “Did you like what you saw?” He did. She says now it’s her turn to see him naked, and makes him strip and stand in the middle of the road while she shines the headlights on him. Then she scoops up his underpants and drives away, leaving him to walk home naked, ho, ho. (It is not easy to reach out of a car and scoop up underpants from the pavement while continuing to drive. Try it sometime.)
Danielle (Elisha Cuthbert) has two personalities: In one, she’s a sweet, misunderstood kid who has never been loved, and in the other she’s a twisted emotional sadist who amuses herself by toying with the feelings of the naive Matthew. The movie alternates between these personalities at its convenience, making her quite the most unpleasant character I have seen in some time.
They have a romance going before one of Matthew’s buddies identifies her, correctly, as a porn star. The movie seems to think, along with Matthew’s friends, that this information is in her favor. Matthew goes through the standard formula: First he’s angry with her, then she gets through his defenses, then he believes she really loves him and that she wants to leave the life she’s been leading. Problem is, her producer is angry because he wants her to keep working. This character, named Kelly, is played by Timothy Olyphant with a skill that would have distinguished a better movie, but it doesn’t work here, because the movie never levels with us. When a guy his age (thirty-six, according to IMDB) “used to be the boyfriend” of a girl her age (nineteen, according to the plot description) and she is already, at nineteen, a famous porn star, there is a good chance the creep corrupted her at an early age; think Traci Lords. That he is now her “producer” under an “exclusive contract” is an elevated form of pimping. To act in porn as a teenager is not a decision freely taken by most teenage girls, and not a life to envy.
There’s worse. The movie produces a basically nice guy, named Hugo Posh (James Remar), also a porn king, who is Kelly’s rival. That a porn king saves the day gives you an idea of the movie’s limited moral horizons. Oh, and not to forget Matthew’s best friends, named Eli and Klitz (Chris Marquette and Paul Dano). Klitz? “Spelled with a K,” he explains.