Next Goal Wins
Can a movie be considered formulaic if it’s based on a true story? Maybe. Like any film, it all depends on the tone and the style the choices made by the storytellers. Unfortunately, “Next Goal Wins” is a case study. It’s an inspirational sports comedy (specifically, football), co-written and directed by Taika Waititi (two “Thor” movies, “Jojo Rabbit,” et al) with Iain Morris (“The Inbetweeners”), that is based on events that really happened: In 2014, Dutch American coach Thomas Rongen was sent to American Samoa to train their team so they could qualify for the FIFA World Cup 13 years after suffered the worst loss in World Cup history (31-0 to Australia). The end product works almost despite itself, at times it seems almost inexplicable that it works as well as it does. It may be, in fact, the most persuasive example yet of the indestructibility of the underdog sports movie template that has served uncounted previous films. “Next Goal Wins” might’ve been commissioned as part of a scientific experiment designed to answer the question “Is the underdog sports movie format so foolproof that it’ll make people cry and cheer even if the movie is competent at best and deeply irritating at worst?”
From a fourth wall breaking prologue in which Waititi (as narrator, a local priest) mugs for the camera and tells us this is a true story with embellishments you’ll never know what’s what through an expository montage about the complete humiliation and demoralization visited upon American Samoan soccer through some other stuff about how depressed/alcoholic/antisocial Rongen was when he arrived there (and bettered himself along with everybody else because narrative dynamics) through its portrayal of American Samoa as basically being “Doc Hollywood” or “My Cousin Vinny” if those movies were set in a cornball eccentric small town in the South Pacific through its upbeat against all odds happy ending, “Next Goal Wins” is amiably listless. It occasionally seems to be raising a mocking eyebrow at us while it barely even tries (and not just when Waititi’s narrator chimes in). It also has the off putting habit of calling our attention to cliched moments by quoting dialogue and situations from other sports movies (“The Karate Kid,” “Any Given Sunday”) and other movies, period (Rongen cribs dialogue from “Taken” and, if my ear doesn’t mistake me, “Malice”).
It’s as if Waititi & Co. are tacitly admitting that it doesn’t matter if the movie is great or even particularly good, our Pavlovian conditioning as underdog sports movie fans means we’ll become emotionally invested even if the script is filled with placeholder dialogue and most of the movie doesn’t so much seem directed as lightly overseen, like a yard cleanup or the loading of a truck on moving day and even if you’ve chosen the least interesting possible protagonist for this particular story.
This is where Rongen comes in, played by Michael Fassbender. He’s the main character and, frankly, every person on the island would have made a more interesting protagonist. Most of the players on the team and their family members are not fully developed characters. The script works their names and synopses of their personal stories into dialogue so often that it starts to feel like they’re being thrown down our throats or perhaps as if someone were nervously reassuring us that yes, they know these people exist even though it may not always seem that way.
The movie is about an American Samoan victory only insofar as it forces Rongen to confront his alcoholism and what he believes caused it. Apparently he was screwing up very badly at his last job whose top executives include Gail (Elisabeth Moss), who used to be married to him, and her new boyfriend, smug scatterbrained league president Will Arnett so they sent him to this island in hopes that being here would help him save himself. (A lot of this movie basically is Apple TV’s “Ted Lasso,” but with Ted replaced by a miserable drunk.)
The other characters are mostly there for Rongen to be unhappy around them including Tavita (Oscar Kightley), who runs the American Samoa soccer federation and serves as a cuddly spiritual sherpa for our hero. To put it bluntly Rongen is such a world-class sour for most of this film that you may occasionally find yourself distractedly wondering things like “Is this nation made up entirely of saints whose only purpose on Earth is to smile through tourists’ insults?” or “If Rongen were just some guy instead of a coach, he’d get beat up all the time.” (Fassbender’s performance, incidentally, is terrible maybe the worst I’ve ever seen him give. At times he comes off like a third rate Bryan Cranston impression during Walter White’s bad guy moments on “Breaking Bad,” and there’s an emptiness in his eyes during his “emotional” scenes that’s honestly kind of spooky.)
Rongen’s “redemption arc” happens mainly through Jaiyah Saelua (Kaimana), one of the players, a fa’afafine (a transgender or nonbinary person who is considered to be a “third gender” in American Samoa). Saelua, like everyone else here, is based on a real person She was a center back for the American Samoa national team who eventually transitioned to female and became the first openly non gender binary player ever to compete in a FIFA qualifying match. So she’s different from pretty much any character you’ve seen in any sports movie before, and also sort of amazing.
But she ends up being written as this weirdly stiff upper lip sub Jackie Robinson type who just smiles anxiously or looks hurt and says nothing while Rongen insults her over and over again out of love for the sport and competitive fire blah blah blah, it quickly becomes clear that she thinks there might be some basic-decent person stuff deep down inside him that could be brought out by kindness. Waititi and his collaborators stop short of making her exist solely to redeem/improve/whatever the word is here the coach as a human being, but they seem aware enough that they’re skating right along the edge of condescension because they have all these indigenous characters constantly joking about how Rongen is exactly what did we just say he was.
To this point, the film is much too crude and shallow about it to let the moment land as anything other than another example of how sad Rongen is (he didn’t mean it, you see, the drink and despair did). Eventually Saelua forgives, forgets, and becomes when she visits Rongen’s bungalow with a videotape of a match for them both to study not just the first person to extend an olive branch but also one who shouldn’t have had to. This sets up a later “reveal” that’s meant to make us forgive Rongen because he’s suffered so much. The scrubbed corporate version of progressive enlightenment offered by the Saelua Rongen subplot and Rongen’s own relationship with the community he openly resents is pure Waititi, who in 2019 made a movie satirizing Adolf Hitler. (He never recovered.)
The final third of “Next Goal Wins” essentially turns into a traditional triumph of the underdogs sports movie once the team takes the field for its final game against Tonga and starts defying expectations left and right. But even then it’s strangely sour, with hotheaded Rongen showing yet again what an abysmal failure he is at handling situations that don’t go his way. Material better suited to one of those ’70s movies about an antihero in New York City is treated like sketch comedy here. So “Next Goal Wins” exists both as evidence of a certain kind of movie’s invulnerability and as a Frankenstein patchwork of previous ones; there are bits of “Cool Runnings” (white guy coaches nonwhite team in different country), bits of “The Bad News Bears” (boozing jerk coach finds redemption through athletics), pieces from any number of films about how team sports can help people heal from trauma.
You’ll still cheer because they’re decent people and they deserve happiness, along with a victory. But saying that a movie succeeds despite itself is not a compliment.
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