Gracie is the story of a girl who tries out for her high school soccer team in 1978 after her the death of her soccer star brother. The movie aspires to be an American Bend It Like Beckham, but is grittier, harder-edged and more realistic. Ironically, the movie's one flaw is that it oversells the "true" nature of the story.
Gracie is loosely based on the life of the Shue family. The character of Gracie is based on Elizabeth Shue (who starred in such movies as Adventures in Babysitting and Leaving Las Vegas) and plays a character based on her mother in the film. The parts that are accurate are that she played soccer on boys' teams (at ages 9-13) and that she had a brother who was a soccer star who died tragically. However, the actual story is fiction.
The movie plays it coy about just how autobiographical it is, including an epilogue which says that thanks to Title IX and Gracie, five million American girls play soccer today and the U.S. women's team won the World Cup. This inspirational statement loses some of its force when you realize that Gracie is a fictional character and that the events in the movie didn't actually happen. However, if you can forgive the overly clever distinction between inspired by true events and true, it is a good movie. (One warning: This movie is a hard PG-13. The language is coarse and there are some uncomfortable adult situations).
In the story, the family is devastated when the soccer-star older brother is killed in a car accident. The father, whose own soccer career had been cut short by a knee injury, shuts down and gives up on life. However, 15-year-old Gracie, who has never played soccer before, announces that she is going to try out for the high school team the following year. Her announcement is met with derision by her family. When she insists, her father gives her a "tryout" against her brothers, which she fails.
In a typical sports movie-cliche, she decides to show everyone by working hard and training herself. In a break from the usual storyline, when she continues to encounter resistance, she gives up and acts out. Gracie stops trying in school, drinks, takes the family car without permission and has a close call with a college boy she seduced.
Her father finally realizes that he will lose his daughter if he doesn't help her. To make up for lost time, he quits his job in order to train his daughter to try out for the team and requires that she go to summer school in the morning to make up the classes she failed. From there, the movie follows a familiar arc where she works hard, wins the right to try out for the team, survives a grueling tryout but only makes the J.V. team and finally gets to enter the big game as a substitute.
The movie is realistic in a lot of respects. Although the character Gracie has natural talent, she still has to work hard to develop that talent. Even after she has trained hard, her first attempt to play street soccer with the boys is disasterous. After she makes the team, she is not as tough as the guys and spends a lot of time getting knocked down and missing shots. When she gets knocked down, she hurts and sometime she cries. It is painful to watch as this slender blonde gets pounded time after time and continue to get up and try again. It seems like most of the games are played in the rain and the mud. (One of the great scenes at the beginning of the film features the father telling his son that in baseball, they would rolling out the tarp and the players would be going home; in football, they have a play and then take a break; but that in soccer, they play nonstop regardless of the conditions).
The movie also manages to capture the sexism of an era without being preachy. From the hard-core sexism of competitive boys who laugh at and try to humiliate an upstart girl to to the red card fouls ignored by the referee to the casual sexist banter at the dinner table, the movie illustrates a harsh environment for girls. Hopefully, the movie depicts a time and place that we have moved on from.
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