Jaiyah Saelua isn’t the focus of “Next Goals Wins,” but it’s her character who opens the door to Thomas’s redemption, beginning the healing of his buried grief. It’s her story arc, not his, that parallels and underscores the thrust of the larger film and drives home its message.
Ultimately, “Next Goal Wins” isn’t really a sports movie at all, but one whose deceptively simple mantras — “Be happy” and “There’s more to life than soccer” — are the most subversive (and winning) things about it.
The heavily embellished true story of a bunch of losers on the worst football team in the world is given the cheeky big screen treatment by director Taika Waititi in “Next Goal Wins,” an sports movie that understands the true meaning of the term “underdogs.” This enjoyable, inspirational, and wholly accessible movie is one that will appeal to the masses, even though (or perhaps because) it is loaded with rubber stamp cinematic conventions.
In April 2001, the American Samoa soccer team took on Australia during a FIFA World Cup qualifying match at Coffs Harbour, NSW. They lost 31-nil.
A Dutch American coach was sent to try reverse the team's ignominious fortunes, and help them try to score their first goal.
Oscar-winning director Taika Waititi has helped immortalise that story in his latest film, Next Goal Wins.
But even though the film focuses on "the beautiful game", it is about so much more.
At the heart of the movie is a character based on Jaiyah Saelua, a striker on the American Samoa team (though not in the 2001 squad), who was the first openly trans athlete to compete in a FIFA World Cup qualifier match.
Ahead of the theatrical debut of Taika Waititi“Next Goal Wins” this weekend, Searchlight Pictures and the lifestyle brand Accompany have released a limited-edition, artisan capsule collection for soccer players, consisting of a handmade soccer ball and athletic socks.
Waititi stars in a campaign for the new collection, called the Fa’atasi Capsule, in which he sits in an all-white ensemble on a crisp soccer field. “As a filmmaker, there’s nothing I love more than telling stories that represent different cultures,” he says in the campaign video. “For example, my latest film ‘Next Goal Wins’ takes place in the American Samoa. Where is that, you ask? It’s in the Pacific. Google it.”
It’s the true story of the International Football team but it’s about way more than just soccer,” he continues. “It’s about Fa’a Samoa: The Samoan Way.”
Next Goal Wins” is based on the true story of the American Samoa soccer team, infamous for their brutal 31-0 FIFA loss in 2001. Their story was immortalized in the 2014 documentary of the same name by Mike Brett and Steve Jamison, although Waititi took some creative liberties in adapting the story for the screen.
The film picks up with the World Cup Qualifiers approaching, as the team hires down-on-his-luck coach Thomas Rongen (Michael Fassbender) in the hopes he will turn around their bleak track record.
Will Arnett, Elisabeth Moss, Oscar Kightley, Kaimana, David Fane, Rachel House, Beulah Koale, Uli Latukefu, Semu Filipo and Lehi Falepapalangi round out the cast.
That’s not a flaw. That’s precisely what’s so good about this oddball little charmer, a welcome return to silly-sweet form for director Taika Waititi, after graduating from such small indie comedies, shot in his native New Zealand, as “Eagle vs Shark, “Boy” and “Hunt for the Wilderpeople” to Marvel’s “Thor: Ragnarok” and the Oscar-winning “Jojo Rabbit.” Both of those big Hollywood movies are excellent films, mind you, but it’s nice to see the filmmaker work on a small canvas again.
Based on a 2014 nonfiction film, also called “Next Goal Wins,” the movie sets out to tell what it calls its “tale of whoa” (terrible pun intended), not by denying its formulaic contours but by embracing them. When Michael Fassbender’s Thomas Rongen first shows up on American Samoa — an island whose two biggest exports are tuna and football players, as Waititi’s narrator tells us — the team’s new coach casts himself as a Mr. Miyagi to their “bunch of Daniel LaRussos.” As Fassbender’s disgraced sports professional, who’s been relegated to career purgatory for anger management and alcohol issues, begins to whip the misfit players into shape, they run drills chanting, “Wax on! Wax off!”
CODA:
Foundation chronicles "...the thousand-year saga of The Foundation, a band of exiles who discover that the only way to save the Galactic Empire from destruction is to defy it."
A young woman leaves her home world on an epic mission that begins at the heart of the galaxy’s iron-fisted ruling dynasty known as Empire.
