You’re most likely to hear about the soccer movie “Gracie” from your cleat-crazy daughter, or niece, or second cousin’s little sister who’s been begging for tickets to the David Beckham game with the Colorado Rapids in August.
Knowing that going in – that “Gracie” is a fairly typical, overcoming-disaster sports movie aimed squarely at 12- year-old girls with a fierce sense of equality, or perchance, superiority – being aware of all this will enhance your enjoyment of a mediocre film.
“Gracie” is a well-made movie with a chip on its shoulder, but it never quite pays off the promising sense of gloom and realism that first draws us in. As played by Carly Schroeder, Gracie is tough, defiant, attractive, determined and plausibly athletic, growing up in a family that ignores her at best and ridicules her at worst.
Yet instead of building on that material to take us in new directions with a real-life spice girl, “Gracie” gets stuck in a repetitive series of training montages and juvenile acting-up. The ending will be inspiring to that shin-kicking niece, but laughably unrealistic to any athlete who’s ever tried to bend one inside the near post.
“Gracie” is a family project of the New Jersey Shues, who produced Elisabeth Shue and her Academy Award nomination for “Leaving Las Vegas,” and Andrew Shue, a former professional soccer player and one of the resident hunks on “Melrose Place.” The whole family was soccer-gonzo, with Elisabeth becoming one of the earliest female stars in New Jersey’s youth leagues.
Older brother William was the best of the bunch, according to the Shues, but died in a car accident in the 1980s. Since then, Andrew Shue wanted to make a movie honoring his brother and the family’s soccer roots, using Elisabeth’s story as a way in. Luckily for Andrew, Elisabeth married director Davis Guggenheim, who took time out of from Oscar-winning documentaries (“An Inconvenient Truth”) to helm the fictional “Gracie.”
When Gracie’s older brother dies in the film, father Dermot Mulroney and mother (Elisabeth Shue herself) are devastated, and ignore Gracie even more than usual. She takes up soccer to prove her worth, and eventually asks her dad’s help in training to join the local high school boys’ team (Title IX not yet having delivered the equality of a girls’ squad).
The basic story is fine; my problems are in the usual sports-movie peripherals. The high school boys are all exaggeratedly cruel; the parents are predictably clueless; town leaders are predictably stodgy. Gracie goes from klutz to clutch in a few easy minutes. The sound- track, however, is top-notch, crammed with ’70s and ’80s radio hits – any movie that picks Springsteen’s “Growin’ Up” for the right spot gains field position in my book.
Take the neighborhood girls and get their view. They’ll appreciate that Gracie is a real person, as comfortable drawing a yellow card as she is drawing on eyeliner. A truly winning American soccer movie has yet to be made, but “Gracie” is good enough to play for a tie.
Staff writer Michael Booth can be reached at mbooth@denverpost.com.
“Gracie”
PG-13 for sexual situations, frank dialogue|1 hour, 35 minutes|SPORTS DRAMA|Directed by Davis Guggenheim; written by Karen Janszen and Lisa Marie Petersen; starring Carly Schroeder, Elisabeth Shue, Dermot Mulroney and Andrew Shue|Opens today at area theaters.
