Review: "When the Game Stands Tall"

“When the Game Stands Tall” is a very good and very atypical sports drama. The hook is that it’s about the longest winning streak in American sports history, as the De La Salle High School Spartans from Concord, Calif., went 11 years without losing -- 151 wins in a row.

But the man at the middle of that story, Bob Ladouceur, seems almost embarrassed about the win streak. In fact, the sport of football is practically secondary to the lessons he’s trying to impart -- about giving a perfect individual effort, relying and being relied upon by those around you, and forming a bond of brotherhood that will help ease the journey from boyhood to manhood.

Played with a calm, almost monotone voice and personality by Jim Caviezel, Ladouceur was repeatedly courted by big college football programs waiving huge paychecks. But he chose to remain at De La Salle until his retirement last year, because he felt he had something to teach high schoolers that would be lost on men at university.

Upon hearing one of his players promise before a game that he would rather die than fail to give his best effort, the coach sternly corrects him and provides the sort of perspective you never hear in a sports flick: “Collapse -- not die. It’s a high school football game.”

He is in many ways the polar opposite of the central character in “Coach Carter,” which was also directed by Thomas Carter. While that coach was an immense personality who took the extraordinary step of benching his entire team of starters, Ladouceur is the sort of fellow who disappears in a crowd. He barely speaks from the sidelines during games, occasionally grabbing a player’s shoulder pads so he can whisper play calls into his ear.

The story, written by Scott Marshall Smith (“Men of Honor”) based on the book by Neil Hayes, follows the team through the tumultuous 2004 season, when a team of relatively unseasoned players blew the winning streak in their opening game and then lost their next game, putting not just their season but the entire identity of the school on the brink.

It’s an interesting and appealing twist on the old saw of taking a bunch of misfits and turning them into winners. Here, we glimpse the highs and lows of the sport, as winners become losers and must carefully, painstakingly earn their way back to the top.

The De La Salle program isn’t like most others. It’s a Christian school, so the players’ and coaches’ faith plays a pivotal role in their ethos. They literally walk onto the field hand-in-hand with each other, both as a sign of their fraternity and to psyche out opponents. Players are made responsible for each other’s performance, even writing out their goals for the next season and another teammate charged with holding them to it.

Challenges await as one season ends and preparation for another begins. A beloved player (a charismatic Stephan James) is murdered two days before leaving for college on a football scholarship. Ladouceur endures troubles on the home front (Laura Dern plays his wife, Matthew Daddario his son) and a personal setback. The team’s captain and star running back (a solid Alexander Ludwig) is ridden hard by his superfan dad (Clancy Brown), who pushes him to strive for the state touchdown record rather than leading the team.

I also enjoyed Michael Chiklis as Terry, Ladouceur’s jumpy assistant coach and best friend; Joe Massingill as Beaser, a stolid offensive lineman; and Jessie Usher as Tayshon, a lightning-fast but callow wide receiver who resists his coach’s altruistic teachings.

“When the Game Stands Tall” succeeds by shunning almost every trope of the rah-rah sports genre, celebrating selflessness and solidarity over outsized personalities and individual glory. This is a movie about what it takes to be great, rather than reveling in any one win, or many.

Video review: "Trouble with the Curve"

Fair warning: I'm much higher on "Trouble with the Curve" than most film critics, and apparently hold a loftier opinion of it than audiences did.

This drama starring Clint Eastwood as an aging baseball scout losing his eyesight only garnered modest interest at the box office, and only scored 52 percent on Rotten Tomates' aggregation of critic opinions. But I found it one of the most emotionally satisfying journeys I experienced in 2012, even if the screenplay is a little shaky in the details.

It's perhaps Eastwood's most sensitive performance, in which he shows real vulnerability and weakness. Gus Lobel may be ornery, but he loves the game like gospel and has the ability to see things others can't -- at least he could, before macular degeneration set in.

His daughter Mickey (Amy Adams) agrees to follow him on a big scouting trip to act as his eyes, and they struggle to reconnect after years of estrangement. Meanwhile, a former pitching prospect named Johnny (Justin Timberlake) who blew his arm out and became a scout, tags along as a rival and a love interest.

The storytelling wavers a bit here and there. Director Robert Lorenz and screenwriter Randy Brown, both rookies, try to wedge in some elements that don't really fit -- a confusing allusion to a harrowing experience in Mickey's childhood being a prime example.

But if the windup isn't always textbook, the delivery is right down the plate. "Trouble with the Curve" was one of my favorite films of 2012.

Alas, video extras are rather skimpy. The DVD comes with a single making-of featurette, "For the Love of the Game." Upgrade to the Blu-ray/DVD combo pack, and all you add is another featurette titled "Rising Through the Ranks."

Movie:3.5 stars out of four
Extras: 1.5 stars

Review: "Trouble with the Curve"

"Trouble with the Curve" exceeds the sum of its parts. An imperfect movie, it has modest flaws and inconsistencies that one can point to. But in the theater with the light flickering, it all just works.

It's like a baseball pitcher who displays shaky form in his windup and delivery, but he hurls strike after strike. The fact that you recognize where it goes wrong only makes how everything ends up in the right place even more amazing.

You sit there, marveling.

This excellent drama stars Clint Eastwood in his most vulnerable performance ever, and is easily one of the finest movies of 2012. It acts as a perfect counterpoint to last year's wonderful "Moneyball."

Both films are set in the world of baseball, but are not really sports movies. Instead, they explore the mix of obsession and fear inside the players, the coaches and the scouts.

In "Moneyball," the heroes were the young nerds with their computers and cutting-edge statistical analysis, which allowed them to circumvent the hard-bitten experience of the old-timers. Here, the crotchety veteran scouts are the good guys, and the whippersnappers who stare at screens but never watch a game play the heavies.

Gus Lobel (Eastwood) is an aging scout for the Atlanta Braves, his specialty being snapping up young talent from the Carolinas. But it's been awhile since he recruited any big names, and his eyesight is starting to go. Gus has been a widower a long time, and an ornery cuss even longer, so it's no surprise that he keeps his macular degeneration a secret.
 
Perhaps his only friend in the world is the head of scouting, Pete Klein (John Goodman, in a solid, comfortable performance). He senses something is wrong, and convinces Gus' daughter Mickey (Amy Adams) to go be with her dad on his big trip. Gus has been given a make-or-break assignment, to judge whether a beefy young swatter named Bo Gentry (Joe Massingill) is the real deal and should be taken with the Braves' first-round pick.

Mickey and her dad are hardly close, and if he's a piece of work, she's studying to outdo him. A lawyer who hasn't taken a Saturday off in seven years, she has a boyfriend dropping hints about marriage, but treats his overtures like a scheduling conflict.

Mickey has a big case looming that will determine whether she makes partner at her firm. Spending a week trying to reconnect with her standoffish father, and serve as his eyes at games, is not high on her list. The dutiful child, she goes anyway.

It's in plumbing this tenuous relationship between father and daughter that the movie saves its best pitches. Adams and Eastwood have an easy, organic connection -- which is a hard thing when playing characters divided by a lifelong inability to see eye-to-eye.

Playing the third wheel is Justin Timberlake as Johnny Flanagan, a former pitching ace signed by Gus who blew out his arm and is now working his way up the food chain with the Red Sox, doing some scouting while hoping to break in as an announcer.

Johnny and Mickey share a timid, funny little courtship -- two lost souls feeling each other out, natural enemies who can't help bantering. For awhile the movie shifts almost entirely away from Gus and onto them, and we don't mind because it feels so natural.

Timberlake has a tendency to be glib and superficial in his performances, oft skating by as the fast-talking charmer, but here he gets a chance to show a few deeper notes and doesn't falter. As an actor, he's getting there.

The real revelation, though, is Eastwood. At age 82, he does things he simply couldn't have done 25 years ago, balancing moments of humor or tragedy on a risky edge. At one point he sings sweetly to his wife's gravestone, and in another he rejects his daughter's heartfelt outreach.

Given the sorts of movies he used to make and the way he played them, the old Eastwood would have just landed on these moments, hit them solidly and moved on. Here, he caresses and elevates them, like a jazz musician holding a long note, bending it and adding colors unwritten on any sheet of music.

The last time Eastwood acted in a movie he didn't direct himself was 1993's "In the Line of Fire," for veteran Wolfgang Peterson. Here he's doing it for a rookie screenwriter, Randy Brown, and first-time director Robert Lorenz, who's been a producer/assistant director on a number of Eastwood projects.

It says something when someone of Eastwood's stature entrusts himself to a creative team who are novices. From the bracing success of "Trouble with the Curve," it would seem he shares Gus' knack for spotting new talent.

3.5 stars out of four