By Kim Voynar Voynar@moviecitynews.com

Short Take: The Winning Season (views)

Posted Tuesday, January 20th, 2009 - Comments Off on Short Take: The Winning Season (views)
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James C. Strouse‘s The Winning Season, a sports drama about Bill, an alcoholic former high school basketball star and coach (Sam Rockwell) who’s given a chance to redeem himself by coaching a varsity girls’ basketball team. Feels a bit like The Bad News Bears meets A League of Their Own: a rag-tag, disorganized group of girls who have little chance to win at all, much less have a winning season, pull together to win enough games to qualify to play at sectionals.


The script is somewhat predictable, having most of the elements of an underdog-sports-team fighting against improbable odds, led by a coach who’s got plenty of his own problems; aside from the drinking, Bill has a contentious relationship with his ex-wife, spurred mostly by his own anger and resentment, and his teenage daughter doesn’t even want to see or talk to him. The script’s problems are somewhat surprising given the care with which Strouse crafted the script for Grace is Gone, one of the more under-appreciated films of 2007.
Rockwell turns in a typically solid performance, and the girls on the team are quite good, most notably Emma Roberts as Abbie, the team leader, who lives with her grandmother because her own parents abandoned her, Emily Rios (Quinceanara) as Kathy, a Mexican girl who doesn’t fit in anywhere and has to deal with racism in their small Indiana town, and Shareeka Epps (Half Nelson) as Lisa, the team’s lone African-American girl, who resents Kathy to the extent that she won’t even pass her the ball.
While the script does give the audience something to work with in understanding Bill and having empathy for him, the female characters aren’t as fleshed out as they could be. In particular, I would have liked to have seen Epps’ character better drawn; she’s a fiercely powerful young actress and while she elevates the part, she needs more to work with to take advantage of her talent. Roberts charms though, and continues to display considerable talent at carrying the scenes she’s in. The script also gets a little heavy-handed with the “girls are different from boys” lessons.
In spite of the problems the film has with some of the character structure and plot, The Winning Season could have commercial appeal, particularly given the presence of Roberts, who girls in the tween-teen demographic. And for all that it was predictable, I remained engaged in it largely due to the performances by Rockwell and the three lead girls, which help the film to rise above its problems, and the Strouse’s direction keeps things moving along. It’s good to see both Epps and Rios in another film; they’ve both done some work since Half Nelson and Quinceanara, but I haven’t caught it. I’d like to see both actresses doing work in more challenging roles that push them harder.

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

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~ David Simon