Editor’s Note: Vanyaland film editor Nick Johnston is back in Canada all week covering the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival. We wish we were up there with him! Check out our continuing coverage of TIFF 2023, read our official preview, and revisit our complete archives of prior editions.
If any filmmaker has benefited from the “One for me, one for you” strategy that the House of Mouse employs to get top-tier talent to helm whatever essential-to-the-bottom-line tentpole they’re aiming to release in a given fiscal year, it’s Taika Waititi. Chloe Zhao might have gotten the Best Picture statuette out of her time with them, but she essentially vanished after Eternals underwhelmed, and only some multiversal version of a D-tier Marvel superhero – D-Man, perhaps – knows what would have happened had Eternals actually come out on schedule. Taika, meanwhile, had an epic arc: he made a good Thor movie, got an Oscar for Jojo Rabbit on a night when it seemed Parasite would take everything, made a bad Thor movie, and has now cashed in his second golden ticket to make Next Goal Wins, which has been sitting on a shelf for the better part of three years thanks to pandemic delays and unplanned reshoots. It was originally planned to release prior to Thor: Love and Thunder but is weirdly positioned as a kind of comeback vehicle for people alienated by that film’s False Metal or its lightning-wielding child soldiers or just the whole Phase Four era of the MCU — a proper “return to form.” This isn’t referring to the movie’s quality, merely its content, which synthesizes who he was before Marvel and who he became after Ragnarok in a way that doesn’t offer a particularly flattering forecast for the future.
Waititi possessed a few traits that made him a particularly appealing get for Kevin Feige. The MCU requires, above all else, a sense of humor – Zhao failed because she tried to take her material seriously and discovered just how lacking these narratives can be when they’re not presented to a viewer with a wink and a smile (much less a decent cast) – and Waititi’s is often appealing, operating between the juvenile and the childlike with a keen intelligence underwriting it all. He’s quirky but not aggressively so, and his films, at least until 2019, never felt like they were being particularly try-hard in their oddity. He manages ensemble casts well – most of his movies are about small communities, in a way — and rewards even his most insignificant players a chance to show their stuff. And, finally, all of his films (with the possible exception of Thor: Love and Thunder) are grounded in a setting that has an aesthetic geared towards the comically surreal, including real places such as Wellington and its suburb Te Aro and fictional ones such as Asgard and Falkenheim, Germany.
Next Goal Wins returns to one of those real places: American Samoa, a tiny protectorate of the U.S. in the Pacific Islands, which is particularly well-known stateside for being a place where great football players emerge. The problem is, they’re typically tossing the pigskin rather than kicking a soccer ball: the American Samoa Men’s National Team is, to put it lightly, terrible. A 31-0 – yes, again, we’re talking about soccer football here – loss to Australia in the qualifiers for the 2001 World Cup put the team into a hole that they couldn’t climb out of. They lost 38 straight games until Thomas Rongen (Michael Fassbender) showed up. Normally you’d see lots of Rocky-style training montages, but this isn’t that kind of movie. Rongen’s a drunk with a mean streak, being as full of deep pain as his Big Gulp cup is full of bourbon, and American Samoa is his wash-out job, the last coaching position available to him after he burned all of his bridges in the States. He sees the team as a bunch of lay-about losers without an ounce of talent and seriously considers quitting the team time and time again. But something – be it fate or the pleading of FFAS head Tavita (Oscar Kightly) or the fact that, after some initial stumbles due to her gender identity, he becomes friends with Jayiuh (Kaimana), a Fa’afafine (a Polynesian third gender), who is initially one of his biggest opponents – changes within him. And maybe they’ll have a shot to accomplish Tavita’s only goal for the team – to win a single goal – in the upcoming 2011 OFC Nations Cup.
This seems like a fabulous fit for Waitit’s traits that I mentioned earlier: Small island setting, culture clash humor, quirk, and a chance to showcase the skills of actors criminally overlooked by the industry outside of a few giants. Kightly and Kaimana are both swell performers, with most of the film’s best jokes coming from the former (he is almost impossibly well-suited for Waititi) and its few winning dramatic moments played smartly and softly by the latter. But the problem lies with Fassbender, though it’s not entirely his fault. I can understand why Waititi didn’t want to go down the well-trod stereotype of the White Coach coming in and elevating a struggling team of non-whites from a culture so alien to him it often seems extraterrestrial, but the cultural exchange in this movie is facilitated under perpetual duress: Rongen is such a fucking asshole to every single person he meets on the island that it’s hard to summon up an ounce of sympathy for him, even when his ex-wife (Elisabeth Moss) starts dating the head of the US’s football association (Will Arnett, whose casting is one of the reasons this movie took so long to release: He was filling in for Armie Hammer). He spends his time drunk, angry, and mean, surrounded by a bunch of aggressively calm and friendly people.
There is a way to do this, but Waititi chooses a different route, hiding the reasons for Rongen’s deep angst until the film needs a third-act reveal to inspire the squad. This is the one moment in which Fassbender is truly able to shine, releasing a burden of pent-up emotion and decades of training in order to encourage his players to go out and be themselves, but it’s so little and so late that it barely makes a difference. The damage has been done: we watch an entire cast of well-meaning people dance around the aggressiveness of a shithead for two hours, lampooning the fact they’re not going to teach him how to live his life (even if they do, employing goofy means to do so), which is patronizing in its own right. The dual redemption arcs don’t dovetail as much as they’re intended to, with the stakes being received so breezily by the Samoan side that they hardly register as having had an impact. And yet, this is where the film’s focus lies, so much so that he actually forgets to show us the team improving, aside from Rongen and Jaiyuh going on a quest to recruit some of the players from the 2001 squad for the upcoming games. This particular mixture of comedy and drama never reacts to its narrative catalyst, and as such, the film remains inert, even as we want the American Samoans to win because only a heartless bastard would write them off because of one asshole.
This failure to launch is a strange one, given Waititi’s pedigree. He’s only ever made one out-and-out farce in What We Do in the Shadows, and even that film’s meager legacy has been eclipsed by the television show, which has the space to transform a movie with a sitcom premise into an actual sitcom with five seasons and a massive fanbase under its belt. The rest of his movies are sentimental dramedies, as even his Thor films did their best to stretch and tune the heartstrings, to say nothing of his films that managed to make music with them. But, again, the worlds of the film – Rongen’s frustrated isolation and the oasis-like nature of American Samoa and its citizens’ relaxed demeanor – remain at an impasse outside of those few final moments, and each one would benefit from aspects of the other. I’ve mentioned the seriousness with which Rongen’s pain is treated, but I wonder if a more Kenny Powers-like approach to the character would soften him up a little bit. Likewise, the team and the island’s population at large are thinly drawn, and a little depth wouldn’t hurt their vibe. As Fassbender is forced to show us, it is a struggle to remain stoic yet cheery, and Waititi’s style just doesn’t allow much room for these characters to grow outside of our pseudo-protagonist.
Come to think of it, the overly sappy and maudlin version of Next Goal Wins that Waititi was trying so hard not to make may actually be the stronger film, and it doesn’t help that there is already a movie about this team sporting the same title: a documentary, released in 2014, that follows Rongen and American Samoa on their journey. I haven’t had the chance to see the original, but one has to imagine that Waititi saw something in there that he tried to translate into a traditionally constructed narrative, something that proves too elusive for his skillset to properly recreate. In a number of ways, it is a better translation of the experience a US Men’s National Team had of watching the 2022 World Cup: tons of talent, tons of interest in the sport (especially from people who had previously never given a single fuck about soccer or football or any sport in general), an unparalleled financial backing, and a gaping hole at the heart of it all where they should have been. Let’s hope a Redeem Team is in the cards for both of them – in fact, I hear Mike Krzyzewski isn’t up to much these days, so maybe he can learn screenwriting and how to coach a soccer team for his second act.