The Slaughter Rule

Starring:Amy Adams (III), Melkon Andonian, David Cale, Juliana Clayton, Kim DeLong, Clea DuVall, J.P. Gabriel, Ryan Gosling, Cody Harvey, Geraldine Keams, Kelly Lynch, John Henry Marshall, David Morse, Chris Offcut, Douglas Seybern, Eddie Spears, Noah Watts, Ken White (IV)
Director: Alex Smith (II)
Studio: Sundance Channel Home Entertainment
Product Type: DVD

Amazon.com

While it may sound like some brutal warrior metaphor for life, this story of a high school boy facing up to the complexities of the adult world is a tender drama about troubled souls. Amiable, good-natured Roy (Ryan Gosling) keeps life at arm's length until renegade coach Gid (a paternal David Morse, who nurses his own emotional wounds) scouts him for a rural six-man football league--a rough, unforgiving game as much rugby as traditional gridiron action--and brings out his hibernating alpha-wolf. Roy also gets lessons in love from "older woman" Clea Duvall, but this is not your usual coming-of-age film. Set on the forever plain and under the magnificent sky of the Montana high desert, and photographed with the crispness of a winter morning, The Slaughter Rule offers an unsentimental portrait of a world in which winning is secondary to simply surviving till the end of the game. --Sean Axmaker

Customer Reviews:

Not great, but not awful........2007-02-28

The Slaughter Rule (Andrew and Alex Smith, 2002)

I'll watch Ryan Gosling in anything. I'll watch David Morse in anything. So when you put the two together, you're bound to get dynamite, right? Well, not really, but it's not for lack of trying on the parts of the two main characters. Roy Chutney (Gosling) is a football player with anger management issues who gets cut from the team after funding is dropped by the state. Gid Ferguson (Morse) is an ex-coach with a shady past who's trying to regain his reputation and glory by putting together an underground football team for a renegade six-man league who battle it out in cow pastures. When the two meet, you've got the ingredients for the kind of uneasy-mentor movie that we haven't seen too much of recently.

Morse and Gosling, as should be expected, are the best parts of this movie. Both are fantastic actors, and they do god work here exploring the dynamics of a relationship fraught with greed and mistrust. The problem is that this relationship alone isn't quite enough to drive the entire movie. It makes it watchable, but not much more than that. Still, if you're a fan of either (or both) of the principals, you'll want to check it out. ** ½

a few good elements but weak overall.......2004-06-29

**1/2 Despite the novelty of its setting, "The Slaughter Rule" is a fairly conventional coming-of-age tale about a boy who grows into manhood by becoming a member of a ragtag six-man football team. Roy is a teenager trapped in a small Montana town whose life has not been going any too well of late. His father, with whom he had only the most casual of relationships, has been discovered dead on a railroad track, a possible suicide victim. His mother, embittered by their divorce, sleeps around with countless men and has no real inclination to provide her son with any but the most cursory form of maternal affection. On top of all this, Roy has just been rejected for the school's varsity football team because the coach finds him lacking in the kind of "anger" he feels a player needs to be a success on the gridiron. When Roy is asked by Gid, a somewhat eccentric older man in the town, to come join his six-man football team, the youth only reluctantly acquiesces (six-man football is a near rule-less poor relation to the real game, one ostensibly only played by farm boys). It is at this point that Roy's growth into manhood begins, since it turns out that the enigmatic Gid, who one assumes will be merely a father figure for the affection-starved youth, may be seeking more than just a father/son, athlete/coach relationship with the boy.

This latent-homosexual subtext, in fact, is just about the only element that separates "The Slaughter Rule" from countless other films in this genre. Most everything else about the film feels derivative and stale: the emotionally distant parents, the promiscuous, psychologically detached mother, the abusive stepdad, the sweet girl who wants to flee this hicksville town as fast and as far as a bus ticket can take her. Towards the end, especially, the filmmakers start to pile up the heartbreaks and tragedies, one on top of the other, almost to epic proportions. One wonders how so much can happen in so short a time to so small a group of people. In the almost two hour running time of the film, only the ambiguity of the Roy/Gid relationship arouses any real interest in the viewer.

Ryan Gosling is tremendously appealing as the troubled Roy, and David Morse (the father in "Contact") turns Gid into a nicely sympathetic figure. The starkness of the Montana landscape also provides an appropriate backdrop for the bleak melodrama that is playing itself out in the foreground. Apart from these few quality elements, however, there isn't a whole lot else to commend in "The Slaughter Rule."

Sundance Slaughters Cinema Standards.......2004-02-27

Sundance directors and screenplay writers constantly slaughter the rules of filmmaking in splendid style. THE SLAUGHTER RULE is no exception to the Sundance standard, however it slowly twists the rules before it nearly breaks them right off.

Set in the bleak and dreary high school years of a cold and frozen-ground Montana, this story of the strong-arm sport of six-man football and a young recruit who recklessly tries to control the often brutal game is clearly a sad satire of lives that many wouldn't bother living. The actual regulation, the slaughter rule, allows a team to simply quit when they're getting badly beaten by their opponents. As our young athlete slowly realizes that you can't stop the weather and you can't keep out the cold and you can't control what you don't respect, he begins to wish that life had a slaughter rule of its own.

Ryan Gosling (THE BELIEVER) continues to excel from one movie to the next. He's like a young Edward Norton (AMERICAN HISTORY X), choosing films for their class and their taste rather than for their big screen appeal. David Morse (THE NEGOTIATOR) is a complex and emotional coach with an odd and dubious attachment to his players. The writing by brothers Alex and Andrew Smith is incredible, as is the often black and white cinematography set in their Montana home. A dreary soundtrack score by alt. country forefather Jay Farrar is subtle and hits home in a simple sort of way. Farrar manages an uppercut from a light slap similar to the way that snow-capped mountains cut the landscape.

This film is not for everyone. It's a football movie on the outside, but don't look for ANY GIVEN SUNDAY or VARSITY BLUES here. Many viewers will have issues with the slow storyline and with the lack of resolution when the credits roll. But, these are the spectators that have problems looking at life as well.

Heartbreaking.......2003-07-14

Ryan Gosling is a wonder!!! The scenes between Ryan and David Morse were so intense that I was moved to tears several times.Both gave heartbreakingly beautiful performances.

Sadly a much misunderstood movie...

Uneasy relationship between coach and quarterback.......2003-07-14

Overall, I liked this film for many of the reasons already mentioned here. It's a high school sports movie that brings to mind the scores of films that have been made in this genre (e.g., "All the Right Moves"), and it tries mostly successfully to work against that genre's conventions. It also explores the male-bonding that underlies the relationship between coach and player by bringing together two males who are both outsiders, each needing the other to fulfill a sense of purpose in lives that are otherwise going nowhere.

Whether the coach's need for "friendship" crosses a boundary is an ambiguity that, from the point where you first see it, makes the film not an easy one to watch. And the filmmakers have created a tension there (sexual or otherwise) that their film doesn't totally resolve -- which is maybe appropriate in the hard-bitten world of the movie, where football is played under bleak winter skies on snow-swept, frozen fields. Endings are often difficult, and this one feels somewhat contrived and melodramatic, but the overall film remains strong, and its moody narrative sticks with you long afterward.

Morse, as the coach, has played this kind of character before and portrays well a man of both pride and weakness, who has experienced hurt and failure. Ryan Gosling is wonderfully natural and plays the young protagonist with what seems to be complete understanding. His affair with an "older" woman may seem a nod to convention, but the relationship is written and played for the truth in it -- that his immaturity makes him less than what she's hoping to find in a man. Equally memorable is the cinematography, capturing the Montana landscapes in wan winter light. The music is perfect.

Amazon.com

Description

The Slaughter Rule is a rich, intense portrait of a young football player facing losses, on the field and off. Roy Chutney (Gosling) is a defeated football hero whose only chance of saving his dignity is "the slaughter rule", a forced end to the game before the point of humiliation. Roy is lost in a world without rules, until renegade coach (Morse) and a new romance give him the strength for one last play. This lush cinematic journey, the first feature film from writers / directors Andrew and Alex Smith, debuted at he 2002 Sundance Film Festival.

Customer Reviews:

Not great, but not awful........2007-02-28

a few good elements but weak overall.......2004-06-29

Sundance Slaughters Cinema Standards.......2004-02-27

Heartbreaking.......2003-07-14

Ryan Gosling is a wonder!!! The scenes between Ryan and David Morse were so intense that I was moved to tears several times.Both gave heartbreakingly beautiful performances.

Sadly a much misunderstood movie...

Uneasy relationship between coach and quarterback.......2003-07-14

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