Entertaiment

1.  The story felt true. “Based on a true story” often means that they’ve gone to town on phony “dilemmas” and increases of jeopardy and lots of melodramatic soul-searching and fake conflict.  Brad Gann’s delicate script keeps the conflicts low key, more like real life, where people try to be civilized.  The only violence is on the football field.  You feel, at the end, that it might have happened exactly like this.

2.  The characters seemed real.  People in this movie are usually pretty inarticulate, unable to say what they feel.  They sometimes say devastating things without meaning to (though sometimes they mean to, of course).  When people say bad things, the other person usually tries to cover his or her emotions and pretend it doesn’t hurt.  The result is that when we do get our emotional climaxes, they are usually triggered by very simple, small things – a few words, a look, a smile.

Well … and a touchdown, of course, but it is a sports movie.

3.  The acting is superb.  Mark Wahlberg as Papale is having a bit of a Dennis Quaid or Jeff Bridges career – doing superb work, but usually in nonflashy parts so he gets neither the huge paydays nor the Oscar nominations.  But we totally buy him in this role.  He looks like he could actually do the stuff the film shows him doing.

Greg Kinnear as Vermeil doesn’t coast on his cute smile – and in the scenes with his wife Carol (Paige Turco), they seem like they have been married a long time and have a good relationship.  That’s hard to bring off in a movie – it’s so much easier to show people who hate each other and chew the scenery to prove it.

Elizabeth Banks as Papale’s love interest (and future wife, Janet Cantrell), has been given a movie-stealing part and makes the most of it.  We always believe that the real woman might be exactly as Banks depicts her.

And the ensemble of actors – Papale’s father, his football playing friends, the bar owner who gives him work during hard times, the coaches and players – they often have very little screen time, just a few moments to convey something – but every moment counts.

4.  Which brings us to director Ericson Core.  He’s a cinematographer – this is his first feature film.  The fact that he’s a cinematographer shows – he knows what the camera can do, and he does it.  The fact that this is his first feature does not show.  Maybe the actors do such wonderful work because they happen to be talented and the director had nothing to do with it (that often happens); but the cast is so consistently real that I believe we’re seeing the stamp of a director who knows how to draw great performances from his actors.  Those directors are rare (and they don’t include, for instance, Woody Allen or George Lucas).  I’m looking forward to seeing what Core does next.