Siblings Elisabeth Shue (an Oscar nominee for Leaving Las Vegas) and Andrew Shue (from TV’s Melrose Place) team up to tell this very personal story of their childhood, their late brother and their love for soccer. Unfortunately, this is one of those times when keeping a family scrapbook would have been far more effective. Their film, Gracie, tumbles headfirst into the tired, bloated “inspirational sports drama” formula, following each required turn so blindly and blandly that it ends in yawns rather than cheers.
In 1978 New Jersey, Gracie (Schroeder—almost a dead ringer for a teenage Heather Graham) has an oddly close, tender relationship with her brother. They never fight, and she tells him she loves him just before he gets into a car with his buddies. Not surprisingly, he dies. Gracie decides to try out for his place on the soccer team, but everyone else agrees that it’s crazy for girls to play soccer. In a lighter movie (like The Karate Kid, in which Elisabeth also starred), we’d get the quirky coach who trains her, but this time the job falls to her emotionally repressed father (Mulroney). Elisabeth Shue plays a version of her own mother, frowning and folding laundry a lot, while Andrew plays a concerned teacher.
Put your money on the movie to climax with the Big Game, during which Gracie gets her Big Chance, despite the efforts of her evil teammates who, with little concern for their own future, wish to stop her. In between, the movie gives us emotionally wrenching dribbling practices in the rain, accompanied by a jumbo-size musical score, as well as heavy symbolism like the family’s pet bird, trapped in a cage much too small for it. (Get it? Gracie is like the bird!)
Oddly, this clueless concoction comes from a recent Oscar-winner, Guggenheim, the man who made a slide show so captivating in An Inconvenient Truth. The trouble with Gracie no doubt comes from everyone’s efforts to honor the real-life Shue story, a heavy burden that probably hamstrung all creative impulses as well as any tendency toward humor. To put it into a soccer metaphor, rather than taking a free kick and letting it fly, they’ve rolled the ball to a dead stop.