Vinny (Micheal Ward), gifted troublemaker, is calmed down by cool Mal (Bill Nighy)
The Beautiful Game (2024)
Streaming on Netflix
Just do it is easy to say. But what if you’re talking about the down and out, starting from nowhere, without even a reliable roof over their heads?
A low point can be a launching pad, says this fresh take on an old sports movie cliché. As the movie opens, it looks like we might be served that well-worn “uplifting” story yet again of a come-from-behind team that triumphs in the end.
But for the English team soccer players here, the odds are steeper and the stakes bigger than overcoming on the playing field.
They’ve got lives and self-respect to recover. They’ve ended up in homeless shelters because they abused drugs or alcohol, neglected their children or were chronically unable to hold a job. One is a refugee.
Yet the movie convinces us there’s a way up for them, by an unusual route. As it happens, a Homeless Soccer World Cup Competition has been held in selected cities around the world each year since 2001. I had no idea.
Here, director Thea Sharrock and scripter Frank Cottrell Boyce concoct a fictionalized comedy/drama drawn from the lives of real contestants.
It’s about a soccer team of homeless men in their early 20s to late 30s hoping to bring home the gold, and a more promising mindset, from the celebrated international tournament.
Since they’re shaky players at best, what are their chances? Their 70-something manager Mal (Bill Nighy) tells them the effort is worth a go, even though he’s well past his glory days of coaching.
Mal wants to build up these down-and-outers, but he hasn’t led a professional soccer team in more than a dozen years. A lonely widower, he keeps his hand in by buoying up teams of the homeless.
Almost entirely in vain. This year is Mal’s twelfth in competition for the Homeless Gold Cup, and none of his teams has ever won. This latest competition, with homeless teams gathering from around the globe, will happen in Rome.
His English-dwelling recruits, raw, mostly untried misfits, are excited about the trip, but Mal is making them no promises. This scruffy bunch has far more earnestness than skill. There are five of them, and to qualify a team needs six players.
Ever resourceful, Mal has found an ace in Vinny (Micheal Ward), who just might put the team over the top.
Vinny is a gifted “striker”. That term is soccer-speak for a designated goal-kicker, the player who’s most often strategically set up by his teammates to aim the ball at the opposition’s net and score. Like an American football quarterback, a “striker” is a team leader.
But Vinny’s not a team player, since his light has recently dimmed. He was once headed for the big time, but professional soccer teams have given up on him. He’s good but not quite good enough, they conclude. Depressed, he badly needs to revive his mojo.
When I saw Ward in Empire of Light (2022) he was an assured, sexy, silken performer, with implicit stardom shooting off him in bolts.
Here he holds the screen just as confidently. Rich interior acting like this, clear and unfussy, draws a viewer in and can be star-making.
Worse, as Mal shortly discovers, Vinny’s also homeless, unable to find steady work, living in his car. But being homeless is a requirement to be selected for the homeless soccer team, so Mal, needing a sixth team member, offers Vinny a chance to join up. What has he got to lose?
The former rising star can’t admit to his exasperated wife and beloved young daughter that he’s off to Rome with a group of homeless “nobodies”, which is how he dismisses his teammates.
Mal (Bill Nighy, center) demands — and gets — respect for his struggling players
The homeless in the Eternal City. That’s a striking contrast. Cinematographer Mike Eley makes it sparkle with eye-popping colors set against looming ancient monuments. Fragile hopes and a fallen Empire ping one another.
As ranks of competing homeless teams from around the world stream onto the parade ground, grinning in bright uniforms and waving vibrant national banners, you begin to see what a big deal this is for those clambering to get back on their feet.
The English team isn’t looking like a winner. Vinny is turning everyone off and refuses to sleep in the hotel with the others, reclining on park benches overnight rather than spending his off-hours with “nobodies”.
Like every player, he’s assigned a roommate. But rather than moving in with him, Vinny crushes Nathan (Calum Scott Howells, in a delightfully perplexed performance), who’s dutifully taking methadone to recover from heroin addiction.
“Athletes don’t do drugs,” Vinny snarls at Nathan, writing him off. Ashamed, Nathan stops taking methadone, to catastrophic results.
Vinny nastily informs Cal (Kit Young), who used to be the team’s “striker”, that he can’t possibly pull off moves as deft as Vinny’s, the kind to actually inspire the team.
And Vinny won’t show even a modicum of respect for Aldar (Robin Nazari), a Kurdish refugee from Syria whose safe arrival in England is all that’s kept him alive. If he returns to Syria, he’ll be killed.
The team goes down to defeat twice, and it’s looking like it will have to struggle even for third place. And Vinny, brilliant as he is, is sidelined in an altercation with a ref and an opposing player.
But fate, in the form of Protasia (Susan Wokoma), a South African nun managing her country’s team, has a surprise in store for stubborn Vinny.
When a player on Protasia’s team is also sidelined for rough behavior, the competition rules allow her to pick a replacement from any other team, even if that player has been ruled out of play for his own team.
Protasia (what a lovely name) woos Vinny into joining the South African team, where he just might learn that, as the benevolent sister puts it, “No one wins alone. We all support each other.”
That’s hardly a revolutionary message, but it lands sweetly and concretely here. We’ve gotten to see the self-destructive Vinny face the question of fitting in to achieve a goal bigger than himself. And thereby find himself, discover all that he can be.
These beatific contrivances in the script work because Sharrock has assembled a sprightly, hang-loose cast. No player mopes for long. Under her light directorial touch, they hope, suffer setbacks and emerge better people without a lot of angst. The movie goes down easy yet rings true.
Home, it suggests, is actually renewed inside us, and we’re better able to find a physical home when we’ve bolstered the shaky rafters in ourselves.
Among all the lovely, unaffected performances, one of the most endearing is Sheyi Cole’s as Jason, a young Black Englishman who’s helplessly smitten, wondrously, by a Hispanic American girl.
Wokoma’s Protasia has a “godly” spirit. The nun transcends all of soccer’s rough scrimmaging to invoke the faith needed to hold a life, not just a team, together. It’s a mellow, endearing performance brought off by a subtly skillful actress.
Star power works its wonders in most movies, and this one has two performers who command scenes with all but invisible exertion.
Rising star Micheal Ward and seasoned pro Bill Nighy have definitely got game
When I saw Micheal (that’s how his first name is spelled) Ward in Empire of Light (2022), playing a young man working as a movie theater usher before going off to architecture school, he was startling. He was an assured, sexy, silken performer, with implicit stardom shooting off him in bolts.
Here, in a much more modest, subdued, even sullen, role, he holds the screen just as confidently. Playing an abrasive, surly character, he still doesn’t put us off. His work is scaled down, yet he takes us deep inside Vinny.
We form our own judgments about him, beyond what others say. Rich interior acting like this, clear and unfussy, draws a viewer in and can be star-making.
Holding the picture together, with so little effort you can’t classify his acting, is Bill Nighy as Mal, the man who is there for his players without, apparently, much skin in the game for himself.
But we do get a couple of glimpses into his private, unguarded life when he recites his problems out loud, to his deceased wife. Somehow, she gives him sound advice.
Mal’s inner life is afflicted, too, just like the homeless men he’s trying to rescue. It turns out that back in 1983 he and his wife honeymooned in Rome, and Mal hasn’t been back since.
The tuft of longing that fills Mal’s eyes whenever he chides the homeless players has been signaling us all along.
Mal needs a supporting team, too, year after year, to help him bear up. He promises the event’s organizer that he’ll be back next year, with a new English team, probably scrambled together just like this one.
Homelessness, the movie reminds us in the end titles, remains a worldwide crisis. And this tender, beguiling story discloses where homebuilding begins – within all of us.