Soccer-playing actors fall short

Published 9:00 pm Thursday, May 31, 2007

Give “Gracie” credit on this point: The actors in it really look like they can play soccer. That’s no small thing in a movie obsessed with the sport, and that honors a more-or-less true story.

The film is a fictionalized tale based on the experiences of the Shue family, who happen to number in their ranks a famous actress (Elisabeth Shue), sort-of known actor (Andrew Shue), and an Oscar-winning filmmaker (Davis Guggenheim, who directed “An Inconvenient Truth,” is married to Elisabeth Shue).

Evidently the Shue household was full of soccer, and Elisabeth was the only girl playing the sport in her school leagues. The family was greatly affected by the death of an older brother, and this is the event that hangs over “Gracie” as well.

The movie, fragrantly set in 1978, begins with the death of the family golden boy, a local soccer hero. We then track the efforts of 15-year-old Gracie (Carly Schroeder) to convince her mourning father (Dermot Mulroney) that she might be good enough to play on the boys’ varsity team.

That’s pretty much the movie. Elisabeth Shue herself plays Gracie’s mother, but the movie puts its emotional weight in the father-daughter relationship.

This works, in part because of the acting. Mulroney was getting a little dulled out by all the nice-guy roles he generally gets (most recently in “Georgia Rule”), so it’s good to see him play a hard-driving sports dad for a change.

The bulk of the film is carried by Carly Schroeder, a serious-looking blond teenager who’s done lots of TV and a few movies (“Mean Creek,” for instance). She brings the appropriate air of determination to the character.

I also confess to enjoying the ’70s soundtrack, which ranges from KC and the Sunshine Band’s anthemic “Get Down Tonight” to a very fitting Springsteen tune, “Growin’ Up,” which is played at crucial moments.

None of this is quite enough to disguise the predictable story and bland tone of the movie. You can’t help invoking “Bend It Like Beckham,” which still stands as the soccer movie most likely to change the lives of countless adolescent girls. “Gracie” is closer to an “Afterschool Special” than a living, breathing movie.

Carly Schroeder stars in “Gracie.”