"The Winning Season"Despite looking like a 21st century Bad News Bears approximation and bearing the tell-tale mark of a long shelf life and limited theatrical release, The Winning Season is a complete and wonderful surprise. Writer/director James C. Strouse (Lonesome Jim, Grace Is Gone) ironically seems to have hit his biggest business snag with what is easily his most commercial film. Indeed The Winning Season has all the comfortable formula and fast Hollywood pace a film would need to cross over. It also has some of the best executed character work in recent memory, a likable lead in Sam Rockwell, and a refreshingly nuanced and realistic portrayal of teenage girls.
The ever reliable Rockwell picks up where Walter Matthau left off as a drunken busboy who reluctantly takes the offer to coach a girl’s varsity basketball team. At first sight, he laughs off the ramshackle team of just six players. “One of those girls has a broken foot!” But, in true sports picture fashion, both parties will be transformed by the experience of their collaboration. The Winning Season is a reminder that formulas, loathed as they may be, actually did become popular for a reason. There is a stirring principle in the oft maligned “underdog story” that really can’t be shaken. The burden really lies on the cast and storytellers in delivering the premise of the film with genuine heart and authenticity. The Winning Season does just that. Rockwell is surly in a fashion which borders on too rough to forgive but never quite crosses the line. His assistant coach, played by the wonderful character actress Margo Martindale (you’ll know her when you see her), is delightfully dry with just the right amount of optimistic spirit. The girls on the team, led by Nancy Drew star Emma Roberts and Indie Spirit Award winner Shareeka Epps (Half Nelson), operate in a wonderful space of believable normalcy unlike the doe-eyed vixens of Twilight or the crass and mean-spirited 25-year-olds-pretending-to-be-teenagers of the average “teen comedy” these days. They are funny, sometimes selfish, sometimes angry. Always very real. An attribute not to be taken for granted in an industry in which even the best works about adolescent girls tend to offer only a choice between cartoon bitches (Mean Girls) or tortured indie souls (Thirteen). At last, a wonderful in-between for girls who don’t say “fetch” or cut themselves.
Kudos to Strouse for his creation of the best competitive sports story in a good long while and for imbuing it so wonderfully with depth and character. How a film so commercially appealing and genuinely entertaining could be received so quietly is beyond my comprehension. This is a sports genre picture of the most satisfying variety. It also happens to be simultaneously a beautiful and warm character comedy with a delightfully warped streak of dark humor. Let’s hope audiences discover it and give the film its deserved spot in the canon of underdog sports comedies.
Ivan smiles 
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