I am not good at it. I do not enjoy it. I do not play it. I do not bet on it. And apart from a World Cup soccer match or two, or an occasional AFL game, I do not watch it.
I was the kid in high school that would purposefully forget my gym clothes so that I didn't have to participate. I was the one who would deliberately run away from the ball.
In my more pliant years, when my parents, for some reason still not apparent to me, forced me to play tee-ball I was the one who got a reputation for daydreaming in the outfield. Probably about Star Wars,
Sports movies. Fucking love them.
Inexplicable.
I love their completely predictable structure. I love their buddy buddy team building emotions. I love their training montages, their act two desperations and their rousing crescendo finales. It is completely bizarre. The Natural, Field of Dreams, Moneyball, A League of their Own… hell, even dross like Angels in the Outfield will pull me in. It is ridiculous.
They are like my cinematic crack (along with dance movies) so I try my hardest to stay away from them. I don’t often share this fact with friends, nor to I force them to endure the films themselves, with one exception: Goon.
Goon has become my go-to "spring it on friends" movie. It's one of those perfect films that hardly anyone (outside Canada) has heard of. If they have heard of it, they've probably not stooped to actually watching it. They um and aah, they shake their heads, they complain, they agree to give it a go (the last friend I roped in with the angle - "It's The Mighty Ducks, just with shitloads more violence!!!") and without fail they love it. Well, the gays do anyway, I haven't tested the film on too many others.
The gay thing was my "in" to Goon. I can barely recall how I heard about it. It was probably when Towelroad picked it up on the back of the gay slur that kicks off the film's narrative. Truth be told, the film's direct engagement with homosexuality is pretty slight. The film's "goon", Doug Glatt, has a gay brother; that's the extent of it. But it is how that fact is positioned in the film that is important.
Barely 20 minutes into the film and the main character has already come out as (violently) queer positive. And that (violently) positive attitude flows through the film, not just from queer perspective but for multiple dimensions of difference, for women, for the intellectually inferior, for the emasculated and for the generally excluded. Hell, Doug even has his own pseudo-coming out scene when his parents, both doctors, can't come to grips with his reduced intellectual capacity.
Why I love the film as much as I do though is that it manages to do all of this and celebrate its own hyper masculinity and question our celebration of said hyper-masculinity, without ever having to compromising that hyper-masculinity.
For that I owe you an explanation. I have a fair few straight male friends. Let me qualify that; I have a fair few friends I am dead certain are 100% straight. They are not the ones who refuse to step foot in gay bars, nor are they the ones that get fidgety when asked if they find this guy or that guy attractive. They are not the ones who bristle when they are mistaken for gay or try to wriggle out of a hug. Quite the opposite. The straightest men I know aren't all all perturbed at any of that because they are extremely secure in their sexuality. That is the mentality of Goon. It is a film that is very comfortable with itself and it is not afraid to challenge audiences with that comfort.
The film makers lean heavily on two things to keep the film in check: the genre's well-recognised conventions and the unshakeable goodness of their protagonist. Actually, conflate the two because Seann William Scott's performance as Doug Glatt has the very essence of sports films running through his veins. He's an underdog. He's a battler. He has one skill in life and he wants to use it for the betterment of his team. It's just unfortunate for him that his one skill is being able to damage others with ruthless efficiency.
From a physical perspective he's a model athlete but more importantly (especially in the current state of team sports, at least here in Australia) he's an impeccable exemplar to everyone around him.
He respects his team, even when the respect is not mutual; he respects his rivals; he respects (and defends) his family; and, most refreshingly, he respects women (which is more than can be said for the rest of his team). His courtship of Alison Pil's ice hockey groupie character, Eva, provides one of Seann William Scott's most poignant moments (of which there are many, surprisingly... he is seriously good in this). The shot of Doug standing on the street with garbage blowing into his face is absolutely heartbreaking. Thankfully Eva sees it and eventually comes round to him with the line, "You make me want to stop sleeping with a bunch of guys". Doug's response pretty much sums up his completely non-judgemental character: "That's the nicest thing anyone's ever said to me."
Doug is basically everything that sport should be. His team is his life but he refuses to be brought down to their level. He drags them up by their laces with his unrelenting positivity.
The progress is slow but the manner in which Dowse has Doug rein the team in and turn it around is rousingly entertaining. Not only because it is coupled with a run of success on the ice (cue just about every sports film cliché they can get their hands on) but because it gives a running commentary on the personal journeys of some of the individual team members. Hard drinking, recently divorced captain, Gord Ogilvey (Richard Clarkin), gets over his obsession with his ex; foul mouthed goalie, Marco Belchier (Jonathan Cherry) gets his shit together and earns a bit of respect back; and the team's star player, Xavier LaFlamme (hot, hot, Marc-André Grondin), eventually ditches the drugs and women and starts to play again.
LaFlamme is the reason Doug is brought onto the team in the first place. Smashed into shell-shock after an "altercation" with Doug's hero, the notorious enforcer, Ross "The Boss" Rhea, LaFlamme is little use to anybody. He winces at the first sign of violence on the ice and spits at his team (sometimes quite literally) off it. Doug is shipped in as a human shield for LaFlamme but he doesn't want a bar of it. The relationship that builds between the two is the film's heartbeat and gives the film the bulk of its major turning points.
The other relationship that keeps the film rolling is the build towards the eventual on-ice clash between Doug and Rhea. If Doug's relationship with LaFlamme tracks his commitment to his ethos, his interaction with Rhea reveals the ethos itself. Rhea is Doug ten years in the future, jaded, disillusioned, bluntly honest about his perceived role in the game. He is the worker to Doug's idealist.
Their chance meeting in a late-night diner pretty much sums it up.
When they do finally meet, the confrontation is epic.
The brutality of Goon isn't gratuitous. Dowse marks it with operatic grandeur, very literally in fact; the film opens with blood and a dislodged tooth hitting the ice in excruciating slow-motion to a Puccini backing track. Dowse glorifies violence insofar as most audiences of contact sports bay for blood. He serves up what is expected then he pushes past entertainment and into not-so-gentle examination. I'm not going to lie; it gets hard to watch, mainly because by the time the bones start to crack and the teeth start to fly, Seann William Scott will have stolen everyone's heart. Punches land not on a human meat sack but on a beautiful soul. That contextualises the damage we (well, I guess I shouldn't include myself since I'm not a sports fan)... you expect in the name of entertainment.
Dowse obviously expects his audience to check their own relationship to contact sports. He flags that expectation in the reactions of his onscreen crowd. As the damage becomes more confronting the reaction of the crowd begins to turn. And this isn't by any means abstract. Goon is based on a true story (on a book by Adam Frattasio and Doug Smith.rather aptly titled 'Goon: The True Story of an Unlikely Journey Into Minor League Hockey') and the year of the film's release three enforcers in Canada's National Hockey League enforcers died as a direct result of their role in the game.
They make their point. They make it forcefully. But they never sell the game out.
For all this, and more, I fucking love this film. If they'd given Goon a cinematic release here, it most definitely would have ranked high in my top films of the year. That's one of the reasons it is here on this list. It is one of the more recent films that I've seen and adored but not had the option to write about.
Now that my thoughts are written, I'll fuck off.
Goon is #74 in my Personal 100, a journey back through my hundred most beloved films.
You can track my progress here.
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