#44: Slap Shot

Release Date: February 25th, 1977

Format: Streaming (Netflix)

Written by: Nancy Dowd

Directed by: George Roy Hill

4 Stars

I couldn’t get to my laptop fast enough after finishing Slap Shot. I love this movie. Growing up in the Pacific Northwest, minor league hockey was a part of my life and this movie captures something truthful about that world. It’s a great movie. Here are three reasons why I think Slap Shot is the greatest team sports movie of all-time.

Reason #1

Primarily, this is a great comedy. There are dozens of memorable comedic scenes, with a funny script and some hilarious performances. I’m not sure which character is the funniest. Dave “Killer” Carlson? The Hanson Brothers? The goalie, Denis Lemieux? Ned’s depressed wife, Lily? Jim Parr, the moronic Chiefs play-by-play radio announcer? Mo, the team pervert? Just about every scene has a memorable, funny line. 

And the fact that this script was written by a woman, Nancy Dowd, depicting a male dominated business, gives the relationships and dynamics between the characters a flavor that I don’t think would be there had the script been written by a man. The female characters of Slap Shot are on equal footing with the male characters, both in importance to the plot and the humor. 

It’s a free-spirited, funny god damn movie.

Reason #2

This looks like semi-pro hockey. It seems legit, which is a big deal. I hit on this point a little bit with my review of The Iron Claw. A pitfall of many sports movies is that actors don’t look or move like athletes. Typically actors are shorter, with smaller frames and sharp facial features (makes them easier to film). And I don’t care if it’s Daniel Day-Lewis, it’s almost impossible for an actor to learn to authentically replicate a professional athlete’s jumpshot or baseball swing or throw of a football. The balance and efficiency of those moves are honed over years and thousands upon thousands of repetitions by the most coordinated humans in the world. It’s a monumental challenge for most actors to portray athletic movements authentically, and it’s typically up to the director to figure out how to shoot around the action so it can be edited in such a way as to seem believable. 

There is absolutely no such problem of believability in Slap Shot. By mixing in real minor league hockey players with actors who are strong skaters, all of this looks great. I didn’t notice any body doubles. There wasn’t a moment where Paul Newman looked like he shouldn’t or couldn’t be out there. It’s really, really well done. The action on the ice is easy to follow, and since it’s minor league hockey and the Charlestown Chiefs are a last place team, I don’t need Newman to look like Wayne Gretzsky. I need him to look like a washed up 40-something-year-old whose best playing days are behind him. 

Reason #3

I think this might be a brilliant script. I think Dowd captured something here that is deeply truthful about America in the late 1970s, and that is the overall malaise and nihilism of the era. For everything you think this movie might believe in, Dowd presents an equal and opposite counterbelief. This might get a little stream of consciousness, but let me run through some of the ideas in Slap Shot. 

Let’s start with traditional values. Was the past a more innocent time? A better time? Hell no. There’s a scene of Newman’s character, Reggie Dunlop, in general manager Joe McGrath’s office, reminiscing about his early playing days. What does he remember? Mostly about how shit-faced they would all get after the games were over. Earlier there is a scene where McGrath is telling Reggie that he remembers managing a player who would habitually masterbate when he was in the penalty box. There are no traditional values of worth in Slap Shot.  

So is it better to flout all tradition and reject societal norms? Is it better to be the violent, radical, fun-loving Hanson brothers? Not really. If you like violence, you’re probably a fucking idiot, the movie seems to be saying. So should we be like Ned, the only college-educated character in the movie, who performs a strip tease to raucous hoots and hollers while his teammates brawl on the ice in the championship game? Is Ned the good guy? Absolutely not. He spends most of the movie cheating on and neglecting his wife, Lily, who is borderline suicidal.

So is a college education a sham? Is it nobler to be the common working man? Nope. The mill is shutting down in Charlestown, and the men there will just migrate somewhere else, like simple cattle. In fact, Dowd’s script seems to take aim at capitalism throughout the movie: The players are forced to model men’s fashion at the local mall to earn extra money for their penny-pinching front office, and later, the owner refuses to sell the team to a buyer in Florida because her accountant said it’s more profitable to let the team go bankrupt and take a tax writeoff. After hearing this, Dunlop forlornly tells her, we’re human, ya know? It’s a tender moment. When she doesn’t capitulate he tells her that she should remarry because he thinks her young son looks like a “fag.” So much for the tender moment.

So here is a team and a town that is depressed, both emotionally and economically.

So is this an anti-capitalist movie? Not really. The end of the movie has Reggie Dunlop excited to move to Minnesota to become a player-coach for a new team. He’s gonna make a fortune, according to him. Hope is on the horizon. Of course he tells this to his soon-to-be ex-wife as she’s leaving town for New York City, and she looks at him with resignation and pity. He’ll never change. Will her move to New York to start fresh actually work? I don’t know. Nothing in this movie seems to work for long.

So should we all be sad? Is life so hard that it’s not worth trying? Nothing means nothing? I’m not sure that’s the case. Sure the Chiefs are shutting down, and the mill is shutting down, but the movie ends with a victory parade. It was all worth it, right? 

Right?