Not much kick in soccer mom rom-com
In the romantic comedy Playing for Keeps, Gerard Butler is George Dryer, a former soccer star from Scotland who has followed his ex-wife Stacie (Jessica Biel) to Virginia so he can be near their freckle-faced son Lewis (Noah Lomax).
Trying for a job as a sportscaster, he marks time by coaching the boy’s soccer team and immediately excites the attentions of the soccer moms — including Judi Greer, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Uma Thurman — who inundate him with offers of easy, tawdry and (in some cases) irresistible sex, while he strives mightily to hold them off so he can be the father his boy always needed.
It’s a story that raises many questions, including why George would want to raise a son in a town that makes Peyton Place look like Salt Lake City: It’s the beltway unbuckled. George is a familiar character from the movies — the repentant but alluringly mischievous former husband — but in this case he actually seems to have a sense of responsibility. It’s just that, what are you going to do when Uma Thurman appears in your bed in her undies?
In fact, George tosses her out, a discredit to incorrigible exhusbands everywhere. He’s as confused as we are. Playing For Keeps has been written (by I Married An Axe Murderer’s Robbie Fox) and directed (by Pursuit of Happyness’s Gabriele Muccino) as a mushy-- headed vehicle for what are supposed to be a lot of highvoltage star turns. Nothing much makes sense, but look at all the celebrities.
This would be better if they had anything interesting, or appropriate, to do. Butler — the he-man hero in a series of action films — tries hard for the unshorn charm of the down-and-out former athlete, but he has a streak of malevolent toughness that makes him hard to buy as a squishy reformed hellraiser. “You’re like a ticking time bomb with a charming accent,” Stacie tells him, which nails the feeling of upcoming mayhem, although it never arrives.
Among the lusty housewives, Greer and Thurman are mostly embarrassing as desperate women who sneak into his bed, but Zeta-Jones maintains her dignity as a hot mom who at least has a twinkle — it must be irony — in her eyes.
Also along for the fun is Dennis Quaid as Carl, a local businessman who cheats on his wife (Thurman, who can’t get a break in this picture) and bribes George to let his kid play goal, a notion that’s set up for comeuppance but never pays off. Quaid, himself a former bad boy with a killer smile, looks uncomfortable in a role of murky motivations that wander merrily along, disconnected to anything like rational human behaviour.
The most intriguing character, however, is one who appears way down in the credits. James Tupper, born in Dartmouth, N.S., is Matt, Stacie’s new beau and the man who is about to marry her, thus ruining George’s chances of redemption and happiness.
Matt is another stock character in the romantic divorce genre, the handsome but colourless new boyfriend who is decent, caring, faithful, and doomed. He’s just no match for the mop of tousled locks and half-beard that mark George as one of those beddable ruffians.
What, you wonder, happens to nice guys like Matt at the end of movies like Playing for Keeps? Do they move on to one of the unacceptably brazen costars or do they just fade away, taking their unerring cheer and fatal lack of fun-loving adolescence to the next town?
Playing For Keeps reaches its climax in a championship soccer game that we’re supposed to care about as the apotheosis of the devotion of George and Lewis. It’s the movie’s idea of fatherhood — being around for the big goal in a world where you could just as easily be canoodling with Catherine ZetaJones.
I wonder if Matt knows she’s available.