Another of the movies that I had the chance to DVR during one of DirecTV free preview weekends was The Game of Their Lives. It's going to be on again, tomorrow morning at 11:00 AM on Flix (and again on December 18).
The movie starts off at the Major League Soccer All-Star Game in Washington DC in 2004. A younger man approached Dent McSkimming (Patrick Stewart) and asks is Dent could ever have imagined a soccer game being played in a stadium of this size in the US. Cue the flashback....
We're now back in early 1950, in St. Louis, where McSkimming is a young man (played by Terry Kinney, although Patrick Stewart provides all the voiceovers) working as a sports reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. There's an immigrant community known as "The Hill" that was sports-mad, even having produced two baseball Hall of Famers who grew up across the street from one another (Yogi Berra and Joe Garagiola). But there's also a large number of soccer teams playing in The Hill.
In late 1949, the US had qualified for the FIFA World Cup, to be held in Brazil in June 1950 (due to World War II and what not there were only three teams in North American qualifying and the US only needed to draw one game against Cuba to effectively earn their qualification alongside Mexico who beat the crap out of both the US and Cuba). The US Soccer Federation, a shoestring operation at the time, decided that the tryouts for the national team to go to Brazil would be held in St. Louis.
Among the young men from The Hill trying out are goalkeeper Frank Borghi (Gerard Butler), Frank "Pee Wee" Wallace (Jay Rodan), and "Gloves" (Costas Mandylor). They're up against the best soccer players from the east coast led by Walter Bahr (Wes Bentley), and the national team is going to be made up of the best players from both the east coast and the midwest. Obviously all of the players I've mentioned get picked, and everybody heads to New York for training before flying down to Brazil. Pee Wee has a bit of a problem, in that because of his service in World War II, he's now deathly afraid of flying.
Anyhow, the two contingents, the St. Louisians and the easterners, have wildly different styles of play that they have a dickens of a time trying to mesh, and because of ethnicity, with the St. Louisians being mostly Italians and the easterns mostly WASPs. But Walter at least has the intelligence to realize that the folks from St. Louis will listen to Borghi, so Walter gets Borghi to be a sort of co-captain.
Walter also realizes that there's a great player out there who isn't in the training camp: Joe Gaetjens (Jimmy Jean-Louis), a Haitian immigrant working as a dishwasher in a restaurant and who has a radically different culture from either of the other groups. Somehow they're able to draft him into the team.
One of the training matches involves playing against a team of England players not good enough to qualify for the England team considered a co-favorite, although the team is led by one member of the national team, Stanley Mortensen (Gavin Rossdale). He's unsurprisingly dismissive of the Americans, who lost to this B side handily; even worse, the Americans have to go on and play England in Belo Horizonte in a few weeks time.
Finally, the US national team gets down to Brazil, accompanied by McSkimming, who's using his vacation time to cover the tournament for the American press, and even get their uniforms, the question of whether the latter would arrive being a running plot point (which surprises me since the team qualified for Brazil nine months before the actual tournament). The US Army arranges for the flight from Rio de Janeiro to Belo Horizonte for the England game.
Now, since this is a movie based on historical fact, you'll know that the US, who were extreme underdogs, somehow won the game 1-0, with a goal late in the first half from Gaetjens. (Obviously, the US did not go on to get anywhere near winning the tournament.) Head back to the present game, where the surviving members of the team from that game are assembled at RFK stadium, which is why McSkimming is also there.
As I was watching The Game of Our Lives, I couldn't help but think how there's one trope after another cobbled from any earlier sports movie you can think of, to the point that it's almost laughable. From the flashback, to the two disparate halves of a team having to come together, to arrogant Stanley Mortensen getting his comeuppance, to the wacky outsider, and on and on.
That having been said, it's not exactly a bad movie. There's a lot of soccer in it, with an overuse of slow motion, so people who aren't soccer fans may not care for this movie as much. For me, however, I'm always happy to see England lose, the team being perpetually overrated and hyped here in the US because of the cultural and historical ties between the two countries.
There were also some interesting errors, such as the use of a Union Jack at the stadium for the US/England game. Stewart also makes a comment about all of Britain being sad by the result. England, of course, have their own flag, the red St. George's cross on a white field, and something makes me think the Scots would have been ecstatic to find out that England had lost.
The Game of Their Lives doesn't seem to be available on DVD, although you can get it at Amazon streaming.
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