Turkey Bowl Dir. Kyle Smith

[Tribeca Films; 2011]

Styles: drama, American football
Others: Cold Weather, Friday Night Lights

It’s a little league cliché that winning isn’t everything, son, it’s all about how you play the game. But nobody takes that advice in sports dramas, where high-stakes motivations are so ubiquitous that “plot” is mostly interchangeable with “path to victory.” A loved one’s life or the family honor depends on it. Rocky needs to prove he’s not a bum. Even the spelling bee documentary Spellbound stresses us — and its subjects — out like it’s the “e-n-d” of the “w-o-r-l-d.” With pressures like these, how can characters — or audiences — be bothered to simply enjoy playing the game?

Turkey Bowl, the quietly impressive first feature from writer-director Kyle Smith, provides a titular answer as it follows a single installment of an annual (American) football match between a loose-knit group of friends at a patch of grass in an unnamed Los Angeles park. The prize? A frozen Butterball, awarded — in the film’s final punchline — almost as an afterthought by the game’s organizer, Jon (Jon Schmidt), to the person who, it turns out, likely wants it least. Nobody wants a frozen turkey in July. Few of the friends seem to want to even be there in the first place. The stakes, thankfully, couldn’t be lower.

By taking the focus off victory, Turkey Bowl turns a very ordinary match into something that feels rare to witness onscreen: a sports film that’s about playing instead of winning. Absent of any real incentive to try to win, each play becomes significant not for how it strategically advances the game, but for the emotional context surrounding it. And, it turns out, there’s a lot of context.

Midway through the film, the overly aggressive Sergio (Sergio Villareal), a stranger who the gazelle-like flirt Kerry (Kerry Bishé of Scrubs fame) met on her way to the game and who has done his best to start fights and make things personal throughout, says sagely that one of the most important things in sports is knowing how to leave your anger and aggression on the field. Turkey Bowl plays on that maxim, deconstructing it even as it follows it to the letter. There’s anger and aggression aplenty in the surprisingly complex dynamics between the friends: an unathletic guy tries to be athletic to capture Kerry’s affection; one guy’s mad at his friend for disappearing after he got a new girlfriend; Jon’s trying to use the game to hold his rapidly-splintering group of friends together. But although these dynamics come from far beyond the field, the cameras never leave it; what happens on the field stays on the field simply because that’s all we see.

Without introduction or epilogue, Smith uses inter-play banter to gradually reveal the players’ back stories while unfolding a plot right there on the field itself that’s complex enough it would take more than the film’s 62 minutes to summarize. The dialogue’s so natural in flow and delivery that only the wit of the quips (like Sergio’s sorta-meta “leave it on the field”) and the subtle, deliberate drama of its pacing let us know it’s not wholly improvised.

Like the best of sports teams, the actors — all besides Bishé, as unknown in their profession as their characters are in football — give first-rate performances on their own, but it’s their teamwork that seals the deal. The way the ensemble recalibrates and stumbles when Kerry introduces two strangers — the only nonwhite players in the game — is as insightful into the awkwardness of integrating into a group of friends as it is into liberal white people’s floundering attempts at overcoming racial prejudice (it’s a given, of course, that Troy, the only black player, has to be quarterback). Kerry, too, visibly disrupts her team’s dynamics as the only girl without a significant other in a game full of mostly-single guys who compete — against each other — for her attention, if not a date.

In fact, even though there’s nothing to win, Turkey Bowl is as full of competition as the Superbowl. It’s just that everyone’s competing for different things, or nothing in particular. Like this year’s earlier Cold Weather, Turkey Bowl successfully infuses the stylings of recent microbudget American indie into a decidedly non-indie genre subject matter, reinvigorating both in the process. By keeping his cameras firmly in the field, Smith’s arguably made one of the most straightforward, purest non-documentary sports films ever. But what happens on the field, it turns out, is the same as what happens anywhere else: the only thing separating the two is convention, a handful of chalk — or in this case, invisible — lines.

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