The Slaughter Rule

This is a prime example of a flick that breaks all the rules and is still damn good. You always hear filmmakers blather on about how they work their own way, and then you see their junk and think that maybe they should have read a book. This is not one of those times. it's an intense look into sports and rural life and how they interplay with one another in the Midwest.

I was drawn to it by the title, and although it is about football, i could totally relate because when i played Youth baseball, I was on a team so bad one year that literally half of our games were called off early.

Not that this has to do totally with sports, it is more about male relationships, as Roy, the lead character deals with the death of his father through his participation in six-man football. As the story unfolds, he is cut from his own team and hooks up with a new team coached by a strange outsider played by David Morse. he starts off just being intense, but then becomes creepy (there is a homoerotic undertone between coach and player). Ryan Gosling, who plays Roy is solid and Morse is terrific. This ain't "Remember The Titans" but still very much worth checking out. It got good press at this past year's Sundance Film Festival.

I must have been standing next the to the last reviewer in the hallway (at the Park City Library) at Sundance. Morse walked by along with the directors. I managed to corral Andrew Smith and ask him about the movie. (These directors LOVE to talk about their work.)

First of all, this is not a great movie, and may never be fit for the mass market. But it is, I think, a good movie and a very powerful and thought-provoking one. My initial reaction, which I passed onto Smith, was that I was moved by the internal conflict in this unusual coming-of-age story. What kind of man is Gosling going to become? How will he deal not just with the peer pressures and love interests, but with societal prejudices and the essence of humanity, compassion and kindness. Interestingly, I learned that an early tagline considered for the film was something like "What makes a man?"

David Morse's performance is absolutely incredible in this movie. I spoke to a film critic about it and he said he thought Morse was the best American actor that no one has heard of. It is an extremely challenging and enigmatic role that he plays with a poignant, compelling and believable complexity. I was at the same time deeply moved, repulsed, angered and sympathetic. I was reminded that there is good and bad in all of us, and that the demons within are part of the essence of humanity.

Maybe too deep and philosophical for a movie about 8-man football. And that's just it--it's a situational contrast that's unexpected and jarring. If you ever get a chance to see this film, grab it.

I don't usually find movies first by their soundtrack, but I first heard of "The Slaughter Rule" because Jay Farrar, of the late Uncle Tupelo, did the score and song selections, including by Vic Chestnutt, the Flatlanders, and the Pernice Brothers. So I was intrigued when I saw it was on Sundance Channel as it hadn't appeared on screens in New York.

The debut jointly written/directed feature of twin brothers Andrew and Alex Smith, the film has a lot of similarity to Tom Cruise's early "All the Right Moves," even down to charismatic young star Ryan Gosling clearly being a movie star hunk of the future.

Set in the brothers' home area of rugged (and very desolate) Montana in the fall, this film takes its working class football frame of athlete seeking father figure and coach conflict much further in examining maleness and the implications of the homo-eroticism of such sports much further.

It bravely (particularly by David Morse in a touchingly agonized performance) goes into the breach of what much discussion of current scandals has avoided, at the confused nexus of pedophilia and sexual identity, particularly for teen-age boys.

There's also a dollop of racial issues via the very realistically portrayed poverty of the Native Americans.

The women are mostly helpless within this overwhelmingly male environment, and their best choice for survival is just to leave, as unromantically satisfying as that is.

This ranks in the gritty tradition of sports movies as a setting to demonstrate social tensions like "Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner" than more popular fare.

Ok, so I saw this movie at this year's Sundance, and I was sorely unimpressed. It took a good fifteen minutes of footage before there was an edit or a line of dialogue that made any sense, and it took another 30 minutes before the ham-fisted script gave way to a working plot that wasn't contingent on a close-up of Ryan Gosling's smile or contrived moralizing. After the first 45 minutes however, the script blossomed into a watch-able albeit not completely entertaining or thought-provoking. The highlights certainly include both Gosling and Morse's acting, Gosling being an up-and-coming star, and Morse being an extremely well-established character actor with a good feel for disparate emotions. As a sidenote, after the screening I was talking a little smack about the movie to some of my friends when David Morse walked right behind me--He looks like the nicest guy in the world, but he's a solid 6'2" and probably outweighs me by 50 pounds. I removed my foot from my mouth and promptly changed the subject.

Needs to be subtitled sometimes, t'was either the accent or the poor sound system. Unfortunately I'm not into any kind of sport so that does not help but now know a little bit more about American football. A good first time effort.