Taika Waititi: Back for a Good Time (a movie review)

A picture from the movie The Next Goal Wins.

Taika Waititi started out as a quirky indie director who delivered well-liked small-scale films. Then, he was a big Hollywood director receiving acclaim along with consistent profitability. Afterwards, he released one of many poorly received late-stage Marvel movies, and it may have motivated consumers to reconsider how they view him as a writer and director. Now, Next Goal Wins, three years overdue for a release, may perhaps be tasked with restoring Taika’s reputation and the confidence of his fans, especially the more fair-weather among them. So...Does it?

Next Goal Wins opens just about how one might expect it to. Taika, costumed as an American-Samoan priest, breaks the fourth wall to set the scene for the viewer alongside the tone for the film. The movie is very direct in communicating its intent—it doesn’t put on airs. It’s always honest about what it wants to be and, ultimately, what it is. All in all, it’s a goofy parody of a storied history of Hollywood films that have time and again shown an underdog rebirthed as a phoenix, from bottom of the ranks to the very top in what may equate to a narrative act of overcompensation.

As Next Goal Wins adapts a true story—the restoration of the American Samoan team almost a decade after experiencing the worst shutout in World Cup history—Michael Fassbender plays European soccer coach Thomas Rongen, one of the characters lifted directly from real life. The film’s translation of Rongen is an alcoholic divorcee pushed into moving to American Samoa for the coaching gig by his superiors in the league, embittered by life and now by this significant change. To oversimplify things, he’s a curmudgeon who gradually learns to accept a new family and to open up to people who care about him. Yes, it’s all a bit cliché.

But, the lovely thing about Next Goal Wins is that it gets to be cliché. After all, it is a parody. That the movie doesn’t reinvent anything is part of its appeal. It takes its favourite and least favourite parts of the genre, mixes them together, and just... has fun. Fassbender knows exactly how to play his role—always straight-faced and never hamming anything up—and is supported by a more-than-capable cast of talented players in both major and minor roles. And Taika knows how to adjust the premise to suit the film itself—the team doesn’t need to win the World Cup. They don’t need to make it to the finals. They don’t even have to make it to the World Cup at all. As Oscar Knightley’s character Tavita, the head of American Samoan football, tells Fassbender’s character: he has to get the American Samoan team to score one goal in a game. Even as the figurative goalposts shift over the course of the film, they always comedically lack ambition in comparison to the film’s more serious predecessors.

However, it is important to touch upon an aspect of Next Goal Wins: its portrayal of Jaiyah Saelua. Saelua is another of the characters in the film directly adapted from its real events, including the fact that she is a fa’afafine. Fa’afafineis a form of gender identity present in Polynesian cultures including American Samoa that would generally fall somewhere between nonbinary and a transgender woman through a western lens. If this sounds rather unconventional in terms of its precedent in western cinema, that’s probably because it is. The concept of gender identity being discussed through film is still only growing to a degree that better represents the existence of non-cisgender people in contemporary spaces, so trying to introduce a Polynesian parallel to such identities in a film for which that isn’t purely at the centre is an interesting decision, to say the least.

While it is important to properly illustrate Jaiyah in the film—she did directly contribute to the team’s first qualifier victory, as portrayed in the film, and she does have a place in history as the first non-cisgender competitor in a World Cup qualifier—there are some questions to be raised about how it’s done and whether Taika Waititi was the right person to handle it. It should be stated, there are some apparent issues with how the character is treated in the movie (without sufficient explicit note of the problematic nature of this treatment). For one, she’s deadnamed in two distinct scenes, with the second being done intentionally by Fassbender’s character to her face, and without any sufficient apology beyond a brief one-sentence “I shouldn’t have done that” mumbled to Jaiyah. Additionally, Fassbender’s character does, in one scene, interrogate Jaiyah as to the nature of her genitals. Might this have some relevance to competing as an athlete in a professional league? Perhaps. Could this have been treated more delicately or else just exempted on account of its unimportance to the overall story? Probably.

Beyond this questionable subplot, Taika handles the majority of the subject matter responsibly and in a way that delivers a product that is both comedically sound and, at the very least, as emotionally moving as it needs to be (one of the major gut punches at the film’s climax is predictable but still portrayed with the sufficient vivacity and sincerity to grant it weight). The direction is solid, the jokes land, the actors are all beyond capable. Even Michael Giacchino’s score was not only excellent but perfectly drew from and matched the film’s Polynesian setting. I don’t expect Next Goal Wins to be Waititi’s next massive victory—given everything working against it, I might even expect its success to be limited to streaming on Disney+ and/or Hulu in the future, at best. But, I do think the effectiveness of this film breaks down to one statement: If you like Taika Waititi, if you like his past work, if you like his sense of humor, you’ll probably have a good time here. I don’t think it’ll be a paradigm shift. I don’t think it’ll revolutionize the future of film, or even its own genre. But I think it’ll be an enjoyable hour forty, and I do think that’s enough.