The Slaughter Rule

Smart, Thought-provoking
Starring Ryan Gosling (MURDER BY NUMBERS) and David Morse (THE LANGOLIERS), this movie is a *must see* - it's a bittersweet drama about how lonely people deal with loss and vulnerability.

The writers/directors of THE SLAUGHTER RULE are Andrew and Alex Smith - two brothers from Montana who workshopped this script at Sundance. In fact, THE SLAUGHTER RULE was up for Sundance's Grand Jury Prize. The kernel of the script came from their own high school experiences where every boy snickered that the coach was rumored to be gay. Though they never found out if that was the case, the Smiths were haunted by the fact that they dismissed the coach that easily based on school rumor and inuendo.

Gosling plays Roy Chutney, an affable high school student in a small Montana town where there isn't much to do except drink, play football and go to the local bar. In the beginning of the movie, he loses his father and is cut from the varsity team. The combined losses hit him very hard but he is soon...

Uneasy relationship between coach and quarterback
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...

Sundance Slaughters Cinema Standards
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),...

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