Next Goal Wins

It might surprise you to know I’m a sports fan. I grew up playing a bunch of recreational sports, because enjoyment doesn’t translate to talent. For fandom, my childhood intersected quite nicely with a great time to be following Boston sports. I distinctly remember all my teams being absolutely awful when I started paying attention, and being years removed from their last championship (if they’d ever won one). But by the time I was twenty, I’d watched the four major ones each take home at least one championship. I’d also gone to a handful of MLS games, which is sort of like watching soccer.

In recent years, I’ve fallen off watching sports generally. But I’ve always been fascinated by professional matches which feature an absolute drubbing. American football has the Chicago Bears slaughtering the Washington Redskins in the 1940 championship game, 73-0. College basketball has DeVry losing at the hands of Troy State, 253 258 to 141. And international soccer has American Samoa getting smoked by Australia, 31-nil. So the moment I heard Taika Waititi was making a movie about American Samoa, my ears perked up. He’s not my favorite filmmaker, but he has made some excellent movies (namely What We Do in the Shadows and Jojo Rabbit), so I was cautiously optimistic.

Our main character is Thomas Rongen (Michael Fassbender), a disgraced and washed up soccer coach in the USA. Fortunately for him, American Samoa just let go of their own coach Ace (David Fane), so the USSF sends him over to give him one final chance, assigning him to a team no one wants to touch. There, he finds a ragtag bunch of misfits, few of whom are particularly passionate about soccer. Will he be able to whip them into shape in the mere four weeks before the World Cup qualifiers? Or will it be they who shape him?

The premise is inherently very white savior: a white soccer coach comes to a Pacific island to show this struggling team how to actually play the game. But given that Waititi is partially of indigenous descent himself (namely the Māori people of New Zealand), you’d expect him to subvert the trope, and he does. Rongen comes into the position with deep anger issues, which led to the sideline outbursts that in part got him demoted. His big transformation is learning to let go, and remembering that soccer is just a game. So he walks away far more deeply affected than the team is. The movie even pokes fun at the trope directly, as well as general Western fascination with indigenous spiritualism and practices and perceived wisdom.

But by rendering his influence minimal at best, the movie basically argues against its own existence. The team doesn’t change much at all in his time there. Sure, Rongen starts them doing some conditioning drills, and adds a couple players, but we get no sense that any of it really matters. Which isn’t too surprising, given that it only takes place over the span of a few weeks. How could he possibly teach this collection of players who would be out of place on a high school pitch to play at an elite level in such a short time?

So if that’s the case, what are we doing here? There are two threads which join with the comedy and ostensible soccer to form the movie’s soul. One is just Rongen’s journey to rediscover his love for the game. The competition of it all has taken over his personality, a side of him which is partially responsible for he and Gail (Elisabeth Moss) having separated years ago. It’s made him a miserable bastard, and he needs to learn how to enjoy life again.

But the central character who isn’t Rongen is Jaiyah (Kaimana). She identifies as “faʻafafine”, a third-gender/non-binary role in American Samoa. I can’t speak to their experience in society of course, but in the movie, her presence on the team is never questioned or challenged by her teammates or coaches or the FFAS. Rongen, however, has a difficult time accepting it, even going so far as to deadname her when she refuses to listen to his coaching. Which introduces a small arc: they eventually have a heart to heart and Rongen cops to being an asshole, to the point that later on when some Tongan players taunt her, it’s Rongen who talks to her and helps her find the confidence to push past it. As such, it’s somewhat cathartic when she plays a key part in the movie’s climax, even though some of it differs from real life.

Despite there being all these pieces here, they’re strung together so haphazardly, with a focus on the comedy first and the story…third at best, that very little of it manages to land. The Jaiyah bits are basically the only pieces that work at all, and even that’s inconsistent. And the comedy is rough. It’s not a very funny movie, and you can feel it straining so hard to be. For example, when we first meet head of the FFAS Tavita (Oscar Kightley), he tells the players that if they don’t score a goal, the heads of the other islands’ soccer federation will draw boobs on his face in permanent marker. Smash cut to the team looking dejected in the locker room, and Tavita walking in with boobs on his face. Even worse, rather than the (slight) humor of someone with marker all over their face not mentioning that fact, the movie almost immediately calls attention to it, really pummeling this already boring joke into the ground.

What’s most egregious, though, is how it appears that parts of the island’s culture and people are played for laughs. For example, as soon as Rongen gets off the plane, he’s accosted by a TV show called Who’s On the Plane?. Most of the islanders speak in movie references, a half the soccer players have movie character nicknames. Even stuff like everyone stopping to pray at the same time every day is meant to be comedic. It’s trying to do a fish out of water thing, where Rongen is just baffled by things he doesn’t understand. But it fails to turn the corner, since in most of those scenes, Rongen is not the butt of the joke.

Which is to say nothing of the team itself. I’ve alluded a few times to how the team is a mess. Tavita even stresses that the team has never scored a goal (which was far from true in real life, but whatever). A handful of the players are quite fat, a few are drafted off the street, and some are both, such as a police officer named Rambo (Semu Filipo). Their rivalry with the Tonga national team includes multiple West Side Story inspired staredowns, complete with hisses and kissing noises. Listen, I get this is an underdog story, and a comedy. But you’re dealing with a real team, made of real people. So to call them incompetent and unserious before Rongen’s arrival is…bizarre, at best.

Truth is, the story he’s trying to tell doesn’t fit into Waititi’s standard story-telling structures. It doesn’t lend itself to some bizarre or outlandish “sidekick”, and it takes some care to find the comedy within it. As much as I enjoy some of his work, he is not known for his comedic scalpel. This is far from his most sensitive subject matter, and yet he still shows a lack of deftness anyways. It’s disappointing, but not surprising. He’s not worth writing off, but these are amongst the reasons I hesitate to call myself a fan of Waititi. I’m sure he retains the capacity for better work, but it’s not on the screen this time.