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Review: You Gotta Believe

Posted by: Matthew Ardill • September 1, 2024 @ 11:00pm

Filed under: Reviews

This weekend saw the opening of the sports film You Gotta Believe. Every generation has a "sports film" – for some it's Field of Dreams, for others it's A League of Their Own or The Sandlot, and for me it was Bad News Bears. I was not a fan of "sport" (the fact I referred to it in quotations makes that painfully obvious) but I did love sports movies and TV shows, especially that particular film. It was a classic underdog story, a group of scrappy foul-mouthed kids pulling together to win a game, defying the odds, and thumbing their noses as assumptions.

You Gotta Believe is the real-life Bad News Bears, a group of kids on the Westside Little League team from Fort Worth, Texas who made it all the way to the Little League World Series, defying expectations and triumphing over adversity. Produced in association with the Little League of America, this could have easily been a hollow, feel-good experience, but at its core it is a tragedy.

Luke Wilson plays Bobby Ratliff, the coach of the Westside team who is diagnosed with a brain tumor stemming from melanoma. This is the inspiration that drove these kids, including his son Robert, to make it to the Little League World Series and it's a motivation that feels all too real for many of us: the drive to do something special for a sick loved one.

The cast is All-Star, with Luke Wilson being joined by Sarah Gadon as his wife Patti Ratliff; Greg Kinnear and Molly Parker as Jon Kelly and Kathy Kelly, the other coach and his wife; along with Lew Temple as Coach Mitch Belew, a staff sergeant in the marines who is very much the Coach Beard to Kinnear's Ted Lasso. In addition, rounding out the adult roles, we have Ali Hassan and Sam Knight, Ali playing the doctor treating Bobby, and Sam playing the owner of a sports memorabilia shop who steps in and helps the team as they struggle, joining them on their journey.

All the adults in the cast put in grounded and heartfelt performances that are touching and at times painful to watch, especially if you've struggled with a terminal illness in the family, but the performances that should not be underrated are those of the kids. Children on screen can often fall into one of two types of performances, overly silly or overly serious, but here they struck the right balance. Moments of the kids riding their bikes, ribbing one another over silly nonsense that 12- and 13-year-old kids would poke fun at one another over, and just generally being kids felt real. The scene where they sit going through baseball cards is one that felt very familiar to me (but for me it was Star Wars trading cards), but the scene where Micheal Cash recieves some painful news is truly powerful and one that was instantly moving.

There are moments that remind us of the intense pressure that kids face in youth sports, but it also reminded us of the inspiration that many draw from games like baseball (and at moments hammered home the reverence and spiritual level of power baseball holds over America). Filmed largely in Toronto and the surrounding area, one scene was so clearly a redressed Toronto convenience store and was mildly humorous for Toronto natives, since it was in a posher neighborhood but was "the hood" of Fort Worth.

The cinematography was a balancing act of film trickery. There is a heavy use of montage and edited-in footage, moments like vintage footage of Satchel Paige or footage recreating the TV coverage of the actual Little League World Series from 2002 (much of the real footage is shown in the closing credits). Being set in 2002, there are little touches that I found fun and were a slight risk on the part of the filmmaker. There are musical cues that are played for humour, like when one of the players is fantasizing about a girl in the stands and trying to show boat, every time he's thinking about showing off it cuts to a musical cue of 2002 pop punk music, only to hard cut when a coach or other player drags him out of his fantasy. Another moment is the montage shooting through the qualifying games where they have lots of funny cuts – Jackass-like camera tricks and visuals showing their progress through the games – but it works. It's shorthand that gets us to the emotional meat, the actual Little League World Series finals.

We don't see many full games, only part of a couple of qualifiers, a couple of quick montages, and their ultimate game, but for this last game, the tricks are gone, the chipper music is gone, and what we see is the real tension these kids experienced portrayed on the screen. It was as real and as serious as any moment in Field of Dreams or Moneyball, and for these kids it was that kind of moment that sits with you for the rest of your life and was treated with respect.

One distracting element, though, was the language. I'm not sure if I got an airplane or Sunday afternoon television edit to review, but there were some almost delightfully cringey VOs inserted in post that brought to mind the television-safe version of The Breakfast Club. This is a film that deals with a lot of intense topics, but language is not going to be a problem. I'm hoping the theatrical release doesn't include these dubs, as there are a few moments it robs of its spirit.

The emotional core of the film is Bobby, but it's also a quote he shared at the top of the film: "Ain't no man can avoid being born average, but there ain't no man got to be common." Satchel Paige said that, and while it's something that can feel like a recruiting call by the Little League of America, it's ultimately true and a beautiful lesson. We control who we are and what we do, so let's make that a beautiful thing. All in all, this is a beautiful sports film that deserves to be in the list of the greats of the genre.