Next Goal Wins (2023)

We watched this move on the long plane ride from Saigon to Tokyo, and enjoyed it. This is a movie that the critics pan and autdiences enjoy, meaning that it is a feel good story that critics find irritating. The screenplay is based on events that actually happened: In 2014, Dutch-American coach Thomas Rongen was sent to American Samoa to train their team so that they could qualify for the FIFA World Cup 13 years after suffering the worst loss in World Cup history (31-0) against Australia. The end product works despite itself, almost inexplicably so at times. It may, in fact, be the most persuasive example yet of the indestructibility of the underdog sports movie template, which has served untold numbers of films. From a fourth-wall-breaking prologue in which Taika Waititi (as the narrator, a local priest) mugs for the camera and tells us that this is a true story with embellishments and you'll never know what's what, through the expository montage about the American Samoan team's complete humiliation and demoralization, through the arrival of the depressed, alcoholic, antisocial Rongen and the assembly and betterment of the team and the portrayal of American Samoa as the South Pacific version of the cornball eccentric small towns in '90s American comedies (and maybe also of New Zealand as well). Rongen is a broken person in so many ways, and his path to redemption is (unusuall) threaded through his relationship with one of the players, Jaiyah Saelua, a fa'afafine (the "third gender" in American Samoa, typically transgender or nonbinary). Saelua, like everyone else in this story, is based on a real person: a center back for the American Samoa national team who eventually transitioned to female and was the first openly non-gender binary player to compete in a FIFA qualifying match. In other words, a person unlike any you've seen in a sports movie and a true pioneer. So, all told, this is worth a watch, despite what the critics say.