The Slaughter Rule Review

Six man football is played in towns too small to field eleven, and the Smith brothers use it as the setting for something closer to a two character study than a sports film. David Morse plays Gid Ferguson, a barfly coach who assembles a team out of boys nobody else wants, and who attaches himself to Roy Chutney with an intensity the film keeps deliberately unreadable. Loneliness, appetite, a substitute fatherhood? Morse plays all three at once and never signals which.

Ryan Gosling gives Roy a watchful stillness, grief held just under the surface, and the scenes immediately after his father's death carry almost no emphasis at all. Eric Alan Edwards shoots Montana in winter light, brown grass under a low sky, and it is beautiful without turning into a postcard. Where the film loses its grip is on its women. Clea DuVall's Skyla and Amy Adams's Doreen are written as functions rather than people, and the romance goes nowhere anyone can trace. The elliptical method costs it too, since whole stretches pass in mood and the last act asks for a payoff the film has been too careful to earn.