A grieving septuagenarian trains a team of hapless young men to compete in the Homeless World Cup in The Beautiful Game, a well-intentioned, feel-good sports drama that has arrived, destined to be forgotten, on Netflix. Directed by Thea Sharrock, the movie doesn’t so much resemble the similarly themed Jhund and Dream — also about the unfortunate being uplifted via sport — as it does a season of a particularly uninspired British sitcom.
The always excellent Bill Nighy stars as Mal, who has been training a team of homeless British men for over a decade. Not all the players in this team are from the UK, however. One of them is a stateless Syrian refugee. More more worryingly, only one among them can actually play football. But when Mal spots the talented Vinny mucking about by himself on a field one day, he extends an invitation for him to join team. Vinny, however, doesn’t want to admit that he has fallen on hard times — in their initial meeting, he is openly disdainful of the other team members, and appears to take offence at their assumption that he’s homeless as well. But he gets the nudge that he needs after a heartbreaking meeting with his little daughter, and finally decides to join Mal and the boys on their World Cup campaign in Rome.
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Played by Michael Ward, Vinny is a version of the stock reluctant hero that we saw in both Nagraj Manjule’s Jhund and Dream, in which this archetype was played by the matinee idol Park Seo-joon. All three movies share the same blueprint, although The Beautiful Game feels oddly lacking in character, and cultural specificity. The differences in the filmmakers’ sensibilities are apparent. Manjule, for obvious reasons, was more concerned about the stories within the stories. In Jhund, the simple task of getting a passport was indistinguishable from a Sisyphean epic; passing through airport security was no different from a Jason Bourne thriller. While The Beautiful Game focusses on how its characters bounce back from setbacks, Jhund trained its gaze on the setbacks themselves.
The movie was actually about the insurmountable battles than marginalised Indians have to win before they can even begin to compete in life. The football was purely incidental; leaving the country was a victory in itself Manjule’s players. The Beautiful Game skips over all such hurdles, and plonks its protagonists down in Rome for the World Cup in less than 30 mins. The remaining hour and a half is quite literally dedicated to the competition, which is the least interesting thing in movies like this — especially if the football itself is filmed in such a confusing manner.
The storytelling feels mechanical and rushed; very inelegant — more English Premier League than the Spanish La Liga. “These are the people who’ve fallen through the cracks, people with stories,” Mal tells Vinny in his pitch to get him to participate — the contest, he says, is a shot at regaining lost pride for some of these men. We learn about them — the smallest details, barely enough — as the plot progresses. The Syrian refugee opens up about his past; another man is quite frank about his heroin addiction; Mal himself gets a couple of scenes in which he reminisces about his dead wife. It’s all by-the-numbers, but also secondary. Because the grand finale that The Beautiful Game builds towards is Vinny’s moment of redemption, which somehow feels even more contrived than a scene in which the English team gets a walkover because the South Africans missed their flight — which, by the way, nobody noticed until everyone was on the pitch, ready for kick-off.
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As magnetic as Nighy often is, he’s no Amitabh Bachchan; nor is Mal’s arc particularly moving. After a point, it’s almost as if The Beautiful Game gives up on him altogether, and chooses instead to prop Vinny up as the hero of the story. Not that this comes out of the blue, but a little grace could’ve gone a long way. There was an opportunity here to examine the class-divide in England, the refugee crisis in Europe, the power of second chances. But the film has its priorities all wrong. It spends far too much time on the pitch, while it should’ve taken a page out of Ted Lasso’s playbook and recognised that the best drama happens off it.
The Beautiful Game
Director – Thea Sharrock
Cast – Bill Nighy, Michael Ward, Valeria Golino, Susan Wokoma
Rating – 2/5
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