Gracie (2007)

If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

Gripping story with well-crafted characters

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

I try to pick out movies that will entertain everyone in our family. Enough of a story to keep me from falling asleep, enough emotional involvement for my wife and an easy to follow plot for my children, with nothing too controversial or adult themed. This film was an absolute winner. It had us all cheering and crying and smiling at the various points in the film. The acting and filming were great and the story was beautifully told. Yes there are clichés and stereotypes, but that just makes it easy to follow for the children. Also, although the film has a football/soccer theme it doesn't require any special interest in this sport to enjoy (I'm no fan). Overall an excellent family movie and a real surprise. I'll be recommending this to my friends.

This is my favorite soccer movie I have ever watched. I always enjoy to watch soccer movies from Ladybugs to Bend it like Beckham. I didn't find Bend it like Beckham to be all that great of a movie. Gracie is more about soccer. And I don't have to explain that. From the many reviews that talk about it, they are all right. Its about the loss this family had to deal with. And its about the hardship Gracie faced trying to join a boys soccer team in a time when that wasn't accepted. As for someone's comment saying that Guggenheim failed to make an emotional connection with the audience, apparently that person must have no heart if they didn't feel a connection! I was one of many who were an "audience" to this movie and I can speak for myself when I say that I was connected emotionally to this movie and to the character, to all of the characters. There is so much more to sports than winning and losing. There's the heart and soul that many of the athletes put into the game and I think Gracie is a great example of someone who didn't give up and succeeded in their goal.

I booked this film for my local theater during a soccer tournament weekend. Having had good results in the past with Bend it Like Beckham and Goal!, I expected good crowds for what I thought was going to be a pretty good movie. This was not the case. This is more a coming of age film than a sports film and is definitely not appropriate for pre-teens. I was embarrassed to sit in the audience with my 11 year old daughter and watch scenes of teen sex in autos and alleyways. Even though nothing was actually shown, the suggestive scenes were graphic enough to prompt me to have a conversation with my daughter about proper dating behavior.Aside from my concerns about the appropriateness of the film for pre-teens, the characters were underdeveloped (e.g. no mention or development of the Dad's former soccer star status), there were continuity errors, such as using the word "suck" in an era when it was not used, and at least one half of the film was a complete downer. So much more could have been done with this story that should have felt triumphant, but didn't.

'Gracie' is a movie about a girl who gets on the varsity boys soccer team after her brother, Johnny Bowen (Jesse Lee Soffer) who was the team star, dies in a car accident. Based on an experience of the Shue family, it has Elizabeth Shue playing Gracie's mother and another Shue, Andrew, as Coach Clark. Gracie Bowen is played by Carly Schroeder, who projects energy and guts, as the role requires. Dermot Mulroney is her father, Bryan Bowen, a former soccer player and a bit of a star in his time himself, but with childhood issues that give him some trouble as a parent. He has coached the family boys as if soccer, for all of them, has always been the only thing, while Gracie was protected but overlooked. But the fact that she nails a shot, on a bet, with bare feet in the opening sequence shows she's got the potential to be a star herself. Her struggle to be accepted at a time when girls didn't play soccer in America (this takes place in the late Seventies) is a way of moving forward when a kind of opening appears; it's also a chance for the family to redeem itself and progressing beyond its grief.'Gracie's' final trajectory leads (somewhat implausibly) to a predictable final big game triumph; but what makes the body of the movie different and good is its focus on training--the training, moreover, of a female athlete, and her endless struggle to prove herself. The story is more about the discipline of sport, the long hard process of conditioning, than the drama of games and wins. Gracie first has to convince her father to coach her despite his not unnatural concern that she isn't tough enough to play against boys. Her mother tells her she must be content as a girl with being second best. She doesn't buy that. Carly Schroeder makes Gracie's passion and conviction appear strong but never forced. Despite the ending this is, for once, a sports film not so much about the dramatic play and the roar of the crowd as it is about practice, practice, practice. The training is as close up as we got in Robert Towne's excellent 1982 'Personal Best,' which starred Mariel Hemingway and was a landmark for its realistic cinematic treatment of a track and field competitor. Again, maybe inevitably, the lesbian issue comes up in 'Gracie' as it does more prominently in 'Personal Best.' This time it appears only as a false stereotype, but at one point even Gracie's very up-front best friend Jena (Julia Garro) has doubts, while her sometime boyfriend, Kyle Rhodes (Christopher Shand), who wanted her for a long time but seemed hard to trust, indeed becomes an enemy at tryout time.The movie's lessons have to do with a family unsure of itself accepting layers of grief, but the fresh image is of a young girl who can be a tough and skillful athlete no matter what anybody thinks. Gracie may get some of its depth and particularity from the involvement of the Shue family. It's a family affair in more ways than one. Director Guggenheim is Elizabeth Shue's husband, and Carly Schroeder's brother plays Gracie's younger brother Mike. The summer's American family films are rarely as unpretentious but solid as this one.