The Slaughter Rule (2002)

While it may sound like some brutal warrior metaphor for life, this story of a high school boy facing up to the complexities of the adult world is a tender drama about troubled souls. Amiable, good-natured Roy (Ryan Gosling) keeps life at arm's length until renegade coach Gid (a paternal David Morse, who nurses his own emotional wounds) scouts him for a rural six-man football league--a rough, unforgiving game as much rugby as traditional gridiron action--and brings out his hibernating alpha-wolf. Roy also gets lessons in love from "older woman" Clea Duvall, but this is not your usual coming-of-age film. Set on the forever plain and under the magnificent sky of the Montana high desert, and photographed with the crispness of a winter morning, The Slaughter Rule offers an unsentimental portrait of a world in which winning is secondary to simply surviving till the end of the game. --Sean Axmaker Amazon.com

Great acting puts this one over the goal line.

As the negative reviews on this page make plain, there's a lot to quarrel with in Alex and Andrew Smith's "The Slaughter Rule." The film is essentially a series of intense set pieces, lacking a strong enough ending and narrative arc to tie them together into a cohesive, satisfying whole. The characters' tragedies and setbacks come unbelievably thick and fast, and large blocks of dialogue are lost because the Smiths encourage the actors to mumble inaudibly. Smaller things about the film also are bothersome, such as the Smiths' decision to saddle the protagonist with the joke name of Roy Chutney. (I kept expecting Uncle Allardyce Chutney and Cousin Clarence P. Chutney, played by W.C. Fields and Groucho Marx, to show up for a visit.)

Nevertheless, "The Slaughter Rule" manages to wield considerable power, thanks to the excellence of its ensemble cast. Mumble though they may, these are actors who know how to keep an audience mesmerized. David Morse gives the performance of his career as Gid, a grizzled, eccentric football coach and celibate gay man with a chaste but burning crush on Roy, his star quarterback. Gid's big speech, meant to reassure Roy about his intentions, instead comes across as a torch song, only serving to scare Roy all the more.

Ryan Gosling is equally compelling as Roy, continuing the extraordinary string of performances he began with "The Believer" and carried through "Half Nelson," "Fracture" and "Lars and the Real Girl." I was also greatly impressed by the performances of Clea DuVall as the barmaid with whom Roy has a brief fling, Eddie Spears as Roy's best friend, Kelly Lynch as Roy's nasty mother, and David Cale as the town drunk, living out of an old Studebaker and sputtering his encyclopedic knowledge of classic country music. (Amy Adams is in the movie too, but you'll miss her if you blink.) Be sure to check out the deleted scenes on this disc, which fill in so many blanks in the story that I'm surprised the Smiths left them out.

July 20, 2008

Give me back my two hours

A total waste of time. The movie tries to evince some deep metaphor about euthanasia or something, or forgiveness or something, I don't know. It's nothing worth making a movie about, that's all I know.
It's also creepy how this movie seeks to portray a high school football coach who is a pediphiliac homosexual in a positive light. Ugh. Utterly, downright creepy. What's creepier are all the positive reviews here. Wow, this collapsing amoral culture is in a lot of trouble.
This movie didn't merit my troubling myself to review it with any more specifics that that. I'm sorry I sat through the whole thing.
It's utterly bleak and hopeless, as well as perverted. Blech! May 27, 2008

I'll watch any thing with Ryan Gosling in it.

This is a wonderful story that explores the relationship between high-school athletes and their coaches.
It held my interest until the end and I really appreciate movies that are not formulaic...this movie went below the surface. February 8, 2008

Not great, but not awful.

The Slaughter Rule (Andrew and Alex Smith, 2002)

I'll watch Ryan Gosling in anything. I'll watch David Morse in anything. So when you put the two together, you're bound to get dynamite, right? Well, not really, but it's not for lack of trying on the parts of the two main characters. Roy Chutney (Gosling) is a football player with anger management issues who gets cut from the team after funding is dropped by the state. Gid Ferguson (Morse) is an ex-coach with a shady past who's trying to regain his reputation and glory by putting together an underground football team for a renegade six-man league who battle it out in cow pastures. When the two meet, you've got the ingredients for the kind of uneasy-mentor movie that we haven't seen too much of recently.

Morse and Gosling, as should be expected, are the best parts of this movie. Both are fantastic actors, and they do god work here exploring the dynamics of a relationship fraught with greed and mistrust. The problem is that this relationship alone isn't quite enough to drive the entire movie. It makes it watchable, but not much more than that. Still, if you're a fan of either (or both) of the principals, you'll want to check it out. ** ½ February 28, 2007

a few good elements but weak overall

**1/2 Despite the novelty of its setting, "The Slaughter Rule" is a fairly conventional coming-of-age tale about a boy who grows into manhood by becoming a member of a ragtag six-man football team. Roy is a teenager trapped in a small Montana town whose life has not been going any too well of late. His father, with whom he had only the most casual of relationships, has been discovered dead on a railroad track, a possible suicide victim. His mother, embittered by their divorce, sleeps around with countless men and has no real inclination to provide her son with any but the most cursory form of maternal affection. On top of all this, Roy has just been rejected for the school's varsity football team because the coach finds him lacking in the kind of "anger" he feels a player needs to be a success on the gridiron. When Roy is asked by Gid, a somewhat eccentric older man in the town, to come join his six-man football team, the youth only reluctantly acquiesces (six-man football is a near rule-less poor relation to the real game, one ostensibly only played by farm boys). It is at this point that Roy's growth into manhood begins, since it turns out that the enigmatic Gid, who one assumes will be merely a father figure for the affection-starved youth, may be seeking more than just a father/son, athlete/coach relationship with the boy.

This latent-homosexual subtext, in fact, is just about the only element that separates "The Slaughter Rule" from countless other films in this genre. Most everything else about the film feels derivative and stale: the emotionally distant parents, the promiscuous, psychologically detached mother, the abusive stepdad, the sweet girl who wants to flee this hicksville town as fast and as far as a bus ticket can take her. Towards the end, especially, the filmmakers start to pile up the heartbreaks and tragedies, one on top of the other, almost to epic proportions. One wonders how so much can happen in so short a time to so small a group of people. In the almost two hour running time of the film, only the ambiguity of the Roy/Gid relationship arouses any real interest in the viewer.

Ryan Gosling is tremendously appealing as the troubled Roy, and David Morse (the father in "Contact") turns Gid into a nicely sympathetic figure. The starkness of the Montana landscape also provides an appropriate backdrop for the bleak melodrama that is playing itself out in the foreground. Apart from these few quality elements, however, there isn't a whole lot else to commend in "The Slaughter Rule." June 28, 2004

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