The Slaughter Rule (2002)

While it may sound like some brutal warrior metaphor for life, this story of a high school boy facing up to the complexities of the adult world is a tender drama about troubled souls. Amiable, good-natured Roy (Ryan Gosling) keeps life at arm's length until renegade coach Gid (a paternal David Morse, who nurses his own emotional wounds) scouts him for a rural six-man football league--a rough, unforgiving game as much rugby as traditional gridiron action--and brings out his hibernating alpha-wolf. Roy also gets lessons in love from "older woman" Clea Duvall, but this is not your usual coming-of-age film. Set on the forever plain and under the magnificent sky of the Montana high desert, and photographed with the crispness of a winter morning, The Slaughter Rule offers an unsentimental portrait of a world in which winning is secondary to simply surviving till the end of the game. --Sean Axmaker Amazon.com

Taunted For Two Months Before I Watched It

When I first got my digital cable in July of 2007, this movie always seem to pop up every damn day on the Sundance channel. This movie stayed on television for two months straight, taunting me to watch it.I've liked Ryan Gosling since I saw him in Murder By Numbers and The Notebook, but I never wanted to watch this film because I'm just not into football. But after one late night in October, I finally decided to give this movie a chance.
I can't lie to you; I was lost as hell. I didn't know where the film was going or where it wanted to go. And this film had REAL Indians in it, so that was what kept me interested. So I kept watching....and kept watching....and kept watching. By the end, I was like, WTF was that?! It seemed stupid to me. I never wanted to watch it again!
Then I realized I had to watch it again for two reasons:

1. I didn't see it from the beginning and

2. I was lying down when I was watching it, therefore I wasn't totally focused.

Damn. So I watched it later in the day because I knew it would be back on. Every time I thought I knew what would happen, something else happened. For me, this film went in too many damn directions and the ending didn't sit well with me. It didn't make much sense to me and I still came to the conclusion that I didn't want to see it again. But after watching it several times, I started to get what the film was trying to say. To this day, I still don't totally get what was supposed to be achieved with David Morse's gay/accused child molesting ways, or Tracey Two Dogs getting injured, or Roy coming to terms with whatever the hell he was supposed to come to terms with. Seems everyone had issues in this movie.
The storyline was all messed up for me, but its the actors who give this the 3/5 stars I've chosen.
David Morse for his creepy performance as a coach who is obsessed with his star player.
Ryan Gosling for his performance of a confused teenager trying to deal with the death of his father, his crazy mother, and whether or not he should get close to a coach with a horrific past.
Eddie Spears for his performance as the kid who gets beaten by his stepfather, and backs his best friend in any decision.
Everyone else seems to be a blur with no purpose but to make an already jacked up story more confusing than when it first started.
What was "The Slaughter Rule" anyway? September 23, 2008

Great acting puts this one over the goal line.

As the negative reviews on this page make plain, there's a lot to quarrel with in Alex and Andrew Smith's "The Slaughter Rule." The film is essentially a series of intense set pieces, lacking a strong enough ending and narrative arc to tie them together into a cohesive, satisfying whole. The characters' tragedies and setbacks come unbelievably thick and fast, and large blocks of dialogue are lost because the Smiths encourage the actors to mumble inaudibly. Smaller things about the film also are bothersome, such as the Smiths' decision to saddle the protagonist with the joke name of Roy Chutney. (I kept expecting Uncle Allardyce Chutney and Cousin Clarence P. Chutney, played by W.C. Fields and Groucho Marx, to show up for a visit.)

Nevertheless, "The Slaughter Rule" manages to wield considerable power, thanks to the excellence of its ensemble cast. Mumble though they may, these are actors who know how to keep an audience mesmerized. David Morse gives the performance of his career as Gid, a grizzled, eccentric football coach and celibate gay man with a chaste but burning crush on Roy, his star quarterback. Gid's big speech, meant to reassure Roy about his intentions, instead comes across as a torch song, only serving to scare Roy all the more.

Ryan Gosling is equally compelling as Roy, continuing the extraordinary string of performances he began with "The Believer" and carried through "Half Nelson," "Fracture" and "Lars and the Real Girl." I was also greatly impressed by the performances of Clea DuVall as the barmaid with whom Roy has a brief fling, Eddie Spears as Roy's best friend, Kelly Lynch as Roy's nasty mother, and David Cale as the town drunk, living out of an old Studebaker and sputtering his encyclopedic knowledge of classic country music. (Amy Adams is in the movie too, but you'll miss her if you blink.) Be sure to check out the deleted scenes on this disc, which fill in so many blanks in the story that I'm surprised the Smiths left them out.

July 20, 2008

Give me back my two hours

A total waste of time. The movie tries to evince some deep metaphor about euthanasia or something, or forgiveness or something, I don't know. It's nothing worth making a movie about, that's all I know.
It's also creepy how this movie seeks to portray a high school football coach who is a pediphiliac homosexual in a positive light. Ugh. Utterly, downright creepy. What's creepier are all the positive reviews here. Wow, this collapsing amoral culture is in a lot of trouble.
This movie didn't merit my troubling myself to review it with any more specifics that that. I'm sorry I sat through the whole thing.
It's utterly bleak and hopeless, as well as perverted. Blech! May 27, 2008

I'll watch any thing with Ryan Gosling in it.

This is a wonderful story that explores the relationship between high-school athletes and their coaches.
It held my interest until the end and I really appreciate movies that are not formulaic...this movie went below the surface. February 8, 2008

Not great, but not awful.

The Slaughter Rule (Andrew and Alex Smith, 2002)

I'll watch Ryan Gosling in anything. I'll watch David Morse in anything. So when you put the two together, you're bound to get dynamite, right? Well, not really, but it's not for lack of trying on the parts of the two main characters. Roy Chutney (Gosling) is a football player with anger management issues who gets cut from the team after funding is dropped by the state. Gid Ferguson (Morse) is an ex-coach with a shady past who's trying to regain his reputation and glory by putting together an underground football team for a renegade six-man league who battle it out in cow pastures. When the two meet, you've got the ingredients for the kind of uneasy-mentor movie that we haven't seen too much of recently.

Morse and Gosling, as should be expected, are the best parts of this movie. Both are fantastic actors, and they do god work here exploring the dynamics of a relationship fraught with greed and mistrust. The problem is that this relationship alone isn't quite enough to drive the entire movie. It makes it watchable, but not much more than that. Still, if you're a fan of either (or both) of the principals, you'll want to check it out. ** ½ February 28, 2007

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