Film Review: You Gotta Believe

You Gotta Believe
Director: Ty Roberts
Santa Rita Film Co. and Crowbar Films
In Theaters 08.30

 I tend to be of the opinion that baseball is spectacularly boring in real life, yet it is perhaps the most cinematic of sports, with the perfect combination of a team effort and individual hero moments can create the maximum amount of drama. On film, where you can control the pacing, it’s hard to totally miss with baseball. You Gotta Believe, a treacly and strictly amateur would-be inspirational film, doesn’t just miss, it hits innocents and does lasting damage. 

In  2002, Bobby Ratliff (Luke Wilson, Bottle Rocket, Horizon: An American Saga), is the head coach of a struggling Little League baseball team in Forth Worth, Texas. In fact, struggling is a charitable word: these kids are seemingly hopeless, yet Bobby puts his heart and soul into team because he loves the game, and his son Bobby (Michael Cash, Blue Bloods) who is on the team, and his other son, Peanut (Joaquin Roberts), who is still too young to play. When Kliff Young (Patrick Renna, The Sandlot) a representative from the league approaches assistant coach Jon Kelly (Greg Kinnear, As Good As It Gets, Heaven Is For Real) about sending the boys to the Little League World Series as the All Star Team, because nobody else wants to play against select ball clubs and they have to send a team or lose their sponsorship. Kelly balks at the idea, but everything changes when Bobby is diagnosed with terminal skin cancer. Bobby begs his childhood buddy to stop focusing on the legal career that Jon selfishly uses to feed his family and commit himself to the team, and Jon decides to take Young up on the offer. All the kids need is some motivation, and what better motivation for a bunch of kids than to cheer up their dying old coach, who always feels at his best when watching the team play? Led by Robert, the boys dedicate their season to Coach Bobby, and against all odds, they actually start playing well, igniting a spark of hope in everyone. 

You Gotta Believe is based on a true story, which only makes the abundance of wrong headed thinking involved all the more disturbing. Director Ty Roberts (12 Mighty Orphans) is nothing if not earnest, yet all he manages to do here is to demonstrate how badly a so-called “feel good” movie can bring you down if it mucks up the message. There are numerous storytelling problems, the most concerning being the way young Robert takes it upon himself to win the season for his Dad, believing that it will make Bobby get better. The rallying cry brings the team together, yet at no point does anyone seem to register the enormously unhealthy responsibility that this boy is putting on himself. When Bobby’s health gets worse, there’s a moment where Robert runs out onto the field and yells up at the sky, giving God a heartfelt “I hate you!” (I had the same thought a number of times while watching the film), yet he’s basically fine by the next scene. When (spoiler alert), Bobby finally does die –after the team has given it their all yet still losing the big game – the devastating effect that this would have on a kid is just swept under the rug, and in the moments when Robert seems to be breaking down, no one ever considers talking to him about it. 

There’s also a some major problems with about the movie’s attitude toward women. The only female characters are a girl that one of the boys has crush on, leading to a lot of objectification and a tasteless erection joke, and the wife of the two coaches. These model old fashioned housewives seem to exist only to support their husbands and help them keep their heads on straight though groan inducing speeches, such as when Jon is giving up and his wife, Kathy (Molly Parker, Words on Bathroom Walls, Jockey) pushes him into the swimming pool. Jon demands to know what she’s doing, and Kathe replies “Lettin’ you drown in yer sorrows! You’ve already done the unimaginable with this team!” This rather manufactured moment seems positively inspired compared to when Robert calls his mother while on the road to ask how Bobby is doing, only to get that answer that he’s fine. Robert angrily shouts “Don’t say fine. When a woman says something’s fine, it’s never fine, it means you’re in the dog house!” It’s nice to know that even if Bobby and Jon can’t find time to address the boy’s obvious impending trauma, they still have plenty of time to instill a sense of misogyny in him. As far as the performances are concerned, Wilson and Kinnear are sleepwalking through impressions of their performances, and the best I can say about the child actors is that the fault for their terrible work should be placed on Roberts’ for failing them as a director.

You Gotta Believe is an odious little monstrosity that fails on every level, never inspiring and certainly genuinely undercutting any messages it aims for on the power of faith as it wades waist deep in denial. Even the baseball sequences are badly executed, with some truly ugly shots seeminging done with a GoPro attached to one of the kids as her runs clashing badly with everything else, and musical score that sounds like it was lifted from an ice cream truck. You Gotta Believe would have been more aptly titled You’ve Gotta Be Kidding. –Patrick Gibbs

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