Next Goal Wins review – chill­ing­ly eager to please

In Next Goal Wins, Tai­ka Wait­i­ti depicts Samoans the same way he depict­ed Hitler in Jojo Rab­bit: as absolute­ly adorable. It’s based on Mike Brett and Steve Jamison’s 2014 doc­u­men­tary of the same name, about min­now foot­ball team Amer­i­can Samoa and their Dutch-Amer­i­can coach Thomas Rongen’s quixot­ic quest to qual­i­fy for the 2014 FIFA World Cup a decade after their infa­mous 31 – 0 defeat against Australia.

The Samoans Ron­gen (Michael Fass­ben­der) meets when he gets off the plane are fey, smil­ing all the time and fuss­i­ly apol­o­gis­ing for them­selves; they’re sweet­ly over­e­mo­tion­al and unfail­ing­ly polite. They’re too dumb to know when some­one is mak­ing fun of them. They’re eager to please. They’re goofy lit­tle mas­cots.
Ron­gen arrives on the island at rock bot­tom, inher­it­ing a team whose strik­er can bare­ly kick a ball with­out falling over and whose over­weight goalie wad­dles around like The Mighty Ducks’ Gold­berg. Taskmas­ter Ron­gen whips them into shape through mul­ti­ple mock-inspi­ra­tional train­ing mon­tages, but also learns to respect their tra­di­tions, par­tic­u­lar­ly regard­ing the fa’afafine iden­ti­ty of cen­ter back Jaiyah Saelua (Kaimana).

The real-life Jaiyah is a still-active play­er whose unique­ly Poly­ne­sian third-gen­der iden­ti­ty high­lights the lim­i­ta­tions of FIFA’s reg­u­la­tions, and has gone on and off oestro­gen around impor­tant match­es. Though Wait­i­ti rel­ish­es the oppor­tu­ni­ty to show off his ally bona fides, giv­ing Ron­gen an arc in which he first dead­names the play­er, then asks her what’s going on ​“down there,” and final­ly gives her an applause-bait­ing pregame pep talk that encour­ages her to hold her own with the boys, the feel-good sto­ry­line has the unfor­tu­nate effect of con­firm­ing the nar­ra­tive that a trans woman’s place is in the men’s lock­er room.

In adapt­ing the doc­u­men­tary of the same name, Wait­i­ti has tak­en pos­ses­sion of a turn-key under­dog sto­ry with ready­made moments of tri­umph, though he keeps his cam­era very close to the action in the on-field scenes, so he doesn’t have to chore­o­graph very much of it. In gen­er­al, the film is bright­ly, flat­ly lit, with the cam­era most­ly anchored at medi­um dis­tance and eye lev­el, which speaks both to Waititi’s indif­fer­ence as a visu­al styl­ist as well as to a gen­er­al we-used-to-make-things-in-this-coun­try decline in indus­try standards.

The end of the film’s cli­mac­tic game is nar­rat­ed after the fact to a char­ac­ter who missed the sec­ond half. It’s just a high­light reel, with no build­ing sus­pense, jump­ing from cli­max to cli­max, each clos­ing an arc for char­ac­ters we’ve met. It’s described so breath­less­ly, its events so scarce­ly believ­able, that it feels made up to keep our atten­tion. (It’s the barest out­line of a real match, with heavy embell­ish­ments.) It’s Wait­i­ti in micro­cosm: a film­mak­er who, in the moment, will just say or do what­ev­er he thinks will make you feel good. It’s how he con­trols the encounter. It’s how he holds onto his power.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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