‘When the Game Stands Tall” is nearly as good as the average episode of TV’s “Friday Nights Lights,” which makes it better than most movies and one of the better sports films of recent years.
Patient and low-key, “When the Game Stands Tall” looks at a hotshot high school football team that, after a 151-game win streak, lost its mojo via off-field crises.
Jim Caviezel wields the clipboard as soft-spoken Bob Ladouceur, whose De La Salle Spartans grow worryingly cocky during their win streak and forget how many times the letter “I” appears in the word “team.”
His message: It’s not about the football, it’s about growing up. So it’s a veteran’s hospital, not the gridiron, that provides the backdrop to the key scene of the film: Meeting amputees teaches the teens what they’ve forgotten. One player says sometimes his legs hurt so much that he wishes he couldn’t feel them. “No, you don’t,” a paralyzed veteran softly chides him. There are warriors, and there are warriors.
A football film suffers from an inherent contradiction that this sincere, heartwarming film grapples with more honestly than most. True, there’s more to life than football, but then again nobody wants to watch a movie about studying for your SATs.
One minute, during the game against the most fearsome opponent of the year, Coach tells an assistant to put in second-string players if the starters are too beaten-up to continue: “I don’t care if it costs us the game,” he says. And yet, when a player says he’s not leaving the game except on a stretcher, director Thomas Carter doesn’t realize he’s negating the moral.
Nevertheless, in a film that whose earnestness and occasional Bible references have bought it throwaway status from its distributor, Carter proves able to find a fresh way to end a sports movie: Not with a big score but with a moment of humility. I call that more satisfying than an 80-yard touchdown.