You hear about how Bella Swan in Twilight is a bad role model for girls, or how Julia Roberts in Pretty Women is a bad image for women. Men, though, haven't developed the same analytical resources. Feminism has given women a way to deconstruct idealized images on screen, to understand the media's manipulation of bodies, desire, and jealousy as both political and aggressive. What red-blooded man could object to that? Everybody learns something, hearts are warmed, those who are so inclined are given the opportunity to gaze upon Gerard Butler's abs, and those with the alternate proclivity are given the opportunity to see Uma Thurman, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Judy Greer project availability. The film, then, is about how coaching soccer helps George to become a good man and a good father. He's moved to Virginia to try to reconnect with them, only to discover that Stacie is about to remarry. His past alpha-male antics (in his time "that man got more ass than a toilet" as one friend puts it) have seriously damaged his relationship with his ex-wife, Stacie (Jessica Biel), and his son, Lewis (Noah Lomax). At the start of the film, he's got no job, few prospects, and can't even pay the rent on his dinky little guest house. Growing a Beard, Getting a Mortgage: When Do Men Become Grown-Ups?īut it's not all effortless victory and copulating for our hero. Dads press cash and Ferraris into his hands moms who look improbably like A-list Hollywood stars take turns throwing themselves at his nether regions. For this manly competence, George receives the usual cinematic reward. Dryer, played by the raffishly scruffy Gerard Butler, is an internationally renowned soccer star, and his brilliant advice (like "kick with the laces, not with the toe") quickly turns the hapless Cyclones into a band of gritty, goal-scoring winners.
In Playing For Keeps, out today, George Dryer, like me, is asked to coach his son's soccer team-but the similarity pretty much ends there. The sense of pitiful, trivial, all-pervading inadequacy was disconcertingly similar to the feeling I had when I was dating-a sensation which, after meeting my wife, I had fervently hoped never to revisit. Overall, it was one of the more depressing episodes of my time as a parent all the more so because of its pettiness.
My coaching skills were certainly not up to overcoming the talent deficit, and my efforts to suggest possible administrative alternatives (like switching players around, as the league was obviously unbalanced) were met with stonewalling by the league and open hostility from other parents. Still, I know how you're supposed to kick a ball and what offsides is, so when I was asked to coach my son's soccer team, I felt like I probably should. I played soccer in high school I was a very mediocre second-stringer on a mediocre team out in northeastern Pennsylvania, where the level of play in the mid-'90s was, as you might imagine, not all that high to begin with.
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