There's a bargain musicals strike with us as audience members: we give in and concede to their idea that some universe exists where up is up and black is black but people just spontaneously sing songs and dance around all the god damned time apropos of not much. In exchange, we get to watch people sing and dance in great cinematic arrays, and its a bargain that usually seems square enough. When one party doesn't come through on the deal though… oh boy. Which takes me to the film that for some reason is opening TIFF '10.
The only two songs I can remember even faintly from Score: A Hockey Musical, and one is the Canadian national anthem. It is sung over the opening credits, which are themselves overlay a bifurcated screen. On the left, a spotlit singer in an empty rink. On the right: archival footage of Canadians playing Canadian hockey outside.
The lyrics to the second song, the song the accompanies the ridiculous film's ridiculous ending, go literally so: "Hockey! Hockey! Proud Canadian… hockey! Hockey!". It's the patriotic, moronic fiction filmic equivalent to a stealth bomber flying over the half-time show at an NFL game except you couldn't gas the jet for what they spent on Score's closing scene.
Michael McGowan's film is a Canadian-heart-on-its-flannel-sleeve that will appeal to no one I can think of. It's a musical with no dancing, with 20 or so songs that sound exactly the same: two or three characters singing dialogue to each other while standing, or sitting, sometimes on a couch and sometimes on a bus, while an acoustic guitar strums absent-mindedly somewhere in the background. There is one musical moment where a brawling team coordinates and begins to sing and punch in unison, and it retains the musical's ability to surprise and delight but it lasts for about 11 seconds and then is gone, gone.
The film's message is one of non-violence, of the need for a young homeschooled naïf-turned-superstar-prospect to be true to his pacifist, lefty roots and not drop the gloves despite the disapproval of his coaches, teammates and sponsors. For the most part, the cast is much, much better than the film they're in, half playing clichéd French-goalie or grizzled-coach roles and the others being asked to tell a weird non-story that dips and winds down the particular snoozy alleys of Toronto's downtown artsy Annex.
It's vaguely insulting, trotting out Walter Gretzky in its own nuclear arms race against itself to continually top its own need to be liked but the problem is is that its message to hockey fans is… no message I can discern. Don't fight? Don't quit? Hockey is fun except when it's not?
It's made up hokum that says some of the right words, that pretends to be about something that a large part of the country actually day-to-day cares about but isn't. There are no jokes. There are no set pieces. There's no dancing, no soul, just a raw appeal to some non-existent populist sentiment, some weird belief that people in Winnipeg or whatever town is Hockeytown this year will be really excited to see a bunch of Torontonians skating around chanting "Hockey, hockey, Canada". Score: A Hockey Musical is meagre and grim, a film that begs to be liked and is bafflingly stingy with its charm, doing almost nothing to earn anything other than boredom and derision. 2/10
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