Michael Fassbender is having an interesting year. On one end, we have David Fincher’s The Killer, a taut and paranoid thriller that spends most of its time inside the head of Fassbender’s borderline-nameless character, a cold and unblinking assassin who spends the entirety of the film attempting to regain his understanding of himself. A mid-tier Fincher film, perhaps, but it elevates a pulpy thriller into a genuinely interesting dissection of the genre. On the opposite end is another film that seeks to adopt the skin of genre storytelling: in this case, the oft-maligned sports dramedy. If The Killer was a reminder of Fassbender’s impressive talent, Next Goal Wins reminds us why we need reminders of his incredible talent in the first place.
Based largely on the 2014 documentary of the same name about American Samoa’s legendarily bad national football team, Taika Waititi’s Next Goal Wins does not elevate the sports dramedy as an art form. Instead, it accomplishes something much worse: It provides us with a look at how a cynically minded filmmaker, given a good story, studio backing and talent, can squander those resources at every turn.
The story, based on real people and events, seems foolproof: a hapless underdog sports team trying to succeed. We should immediately love a ragtag squad that’s fighting hard and doing its best despite never having won a game— but we don’t. One of the biggest failures of Next Goal Wins is that it doesn’t seem interested in fleshing out the lives of the people on this team, though it does devote time to trans athlete Jaiyah Saelua (which is an issue that we’ll get into shortly).
The focus is largely on the cantankerous, down-on-his-luck coach, Thomas Rongen, who was essentially sent to American Samoa as punishment for his repeated on-field meltdowns. Fassbender brings a layer of bitterness to most scenes, even late in the film when you’d imagine he’d have fully warmed up and embraced his situation. He’s vicious and cruel to the American Samoans, storming out of practices and throwing coolers onto the field during practice. The real-life Rongen isn’t unlike this (Deadspin once described him as “a gaping asshole” and “a screeching moron”), but somehow all Fassbender is able to do is give us a performance that has the fury of Luke Wilson imitating John McEnroe in The Royal Tenenbaums without any of the likability.
There’s a warmth in places throughout Next Goal Wins, but as the film progresses, it becomes clear that this glow is merely a byproduct of our memories of other, better films that employ the classic “loser team comes together to win the big game” trope. This isn’t Friday Night Lights or Hoosiers, even if it wants to be. And it doesn’t want to be one of those films badly enough, as it gives us almost zero football, choosing to show us snippets of failed practices in our lead-up to the 2014 FIFA World Cup qualifying round. Even then, we don’t get to see the game’s finale played out in real time — instead, we watch it in even more snippets as they’re recounted by one of the players. Who made this decision, and why did they think football fans wouldn’t want to see football?
Then there’s the aforementioned Saelua, played by nonbinary newcomer Kaimana. Credit where credit is due: Next Goal Wins was good enough to cast an actual trans person to play the fa’afafine Saelua, who was the first trans person to play in a World Cup qualification game. Kaimana makes a six-course meal out of her role, which Waititi wisely chooses to spotlight whenever possible. However, the film seems hellbent on tarnishing any of the goodwill earned by hiring a talented transfemme for the role by subjecting us to Rongen learning Saelua’s deadname, deliberately using it when he’s angry at her for her performance and later asking her what she’s got in her pants. Both Saelua and the film are quick to forgive Rongen for his actions, but for someone who has repeatedly preached the importance of queer characters and storytelling (and has played queer characters himself), it’s shocking that director Waititi not only depicts this behavior without bothering to interrogate it but doesn’t even grant us the dignity of making it compelling.
Next Goal Wins is, at its core, a string of failures that only makes us ask more questions about how it all went wrong — questions like, “Why did you cast Will Arnett and Rhys Darby if you aren’t going to make them funny, even by accident?” and “Why did they give Elisabeth Moss only, like, five minutes of screen time?” and “How is Fassbender belting out Sia’s “Chandelier” three years before the song actually came out?” That last one is small, but it’s a telling example of how little interest Waititi had in the material he was working with. Not knowing that the 2014 FIFA World Cup qualifiers took place in 2011 is an easy mistake to make, but considering somebody worked hard and paid Sia to make it possible for Rongen to belt out “Chandelier” while simultaneously speeding down a narrow road and chugging vodka, you have to wonder why they didn’t just pick “Born This Way” and “Firework” or, maybe, any song that had been released before June of ‘11.
Even the movie’s attempt to humanize Rongen (after he behaves like an utter shithead to everybody, of course) by hitting us with a tragic backstory is delivered in a way that feels like cheap made-for-TV melodrama, plunked into the middle of a sequence where the weight of the reveal feels unearned and hastily added. Much of the dialogue feels half-assed, as well.
Perhaps this is all a little too harsh — after all, Next Goal Wins is an ode to the power of minor victories, where the aim isn’t to win that ‘ship, but to put up just a little more of a fight. Yet it’s hard to escape the feeling that Next Goal Wins is another sign that Waititi just doesn’t have the zest that he did even a couple years ago, when he was making beloved (and sometimes divisive) little bangers like Jojo Rabbit and Thor: Ragnarok. At the very least, it’s a sign that he should stick with films that aim for pure laughs, rather than trying to make a dramedy and ending up with a tonally incoherent film. Waititi is charming as hell on Our Flag Means Death and every moment of What We Do in the Shadows is fried gold, but this film affords us few laughs and even fewer moments of simple greatness. It’s fitting that the film itself feels not unlike the team it depicts: try as it might, even as we see brief, shining glimmers of better decisions and brighter ideas, it just can’t seem to come close to burying it in the back of the net.
Photo courtesy of Searchlight Pictures
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