 | | 05-13-2006, 09:43 PM |
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#9 |
| Master Fan
Joined: Nov 2003
Posts: 17,935
| Quote:
"The Slaughter Rule" is an overwrought drama about a small-town football coach with a tortured attraction to high school boys. The movie has a sympathy for the coach's pain, which makes sense. But it also has the typical independent-movie reluctance to pass judgment, which renders it more squeamish than honest. The picture has no trouble admitting that small towns can be cruel and conformist, but it has a hard time facing up to the notion that grown men should keep their hands off boys.
So there's something off about "The Slaughter Rule" to begin with, a poetic spirit and a delicacy that seems inappropriate and faintly ridiculous. Add a slow pace and a screenplay that's constructed as a series of earnest confrontations, and the result is something that would have seemed impossible: A movie that takes sex, pederasty, young love and football and renders them all boring.
In the midst of this wreckage, set on the Montana plains where everyone seems to be miserable, is one salvageable element, the performance of David Morse as the coach. He's both a sweet fellow and the last guy a boy wants to see in the shower. But "The Slaughter Rule" would have been better with Morse not as a coach but as a Catholic priest -- at least then the sympathetic treatment would have taken some guts.
As young Roy, the quarterback who becomes the object of the coach's fascination, Ryan Gosling gives a one-note performance, in which he keeps overworking the two worry wrinkles between his eyebrows. It's a mannerism he needs to get rid of, just as George Clooney got rid of his impulse to keep nodding his head.
Writer-directors Andrew and Alex Smith go for emotional truth, but what they come up with is often silly. For example, there's a scene in which Roy's girlfriend (Clea DuVall) breaks up with him because he has the temerity to ask her to close the door when she uses the bathroom. Apparently, this is meant to suggest that Roy has intimacy issues.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...07/DD40036.DTL | Ouch. |
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