I thoroughly enjoyed this movie.
While it is a sports movie with all the classic loosing team turns around and makes it to the play offs pieces, it is really just a secondary story mechanic for the real story that this movie is. The main story line very wonderfully puts the sport in the background subservient to the main one--except that main line then takes that sport and shifts the prism that you look through at it bringing it back into the center of the picture being taken. No longer is the sport one of competition, but it becomes part of the cultural identity quest that the main character and the lacrosse team are a part of--a reconnecting that a number of the characters go through.
And it was a wonderful combination. It had the familiar--as I said, all of the elements familiar to a sports movie--so those expectations were met. This allowed the possibility of just enjoying the unfamiliar, that is the cultural themes surrounding the refashioning of character and the camaraderie of the team that comprised facets of the main line. And those two facets are not even the complete main story line picture.
When a movie ends, and I find that I've totally enjoyed myself and yet want more--because that depth was there--that definitely makes the movie tops for me.
I can't speak for the portrayal of the Native American culture in the movie, but since the credits, beginning and end, state the movie was made in consultation with the Onondaga Nation (if not others), I can only hope that the camaraderie shown in the ending of the movie and in the end credits was the same camaraderie in existence behind the scenes in the making of the movie. And if it wasn't, there is something to strive for with future films. And if there was, all the more satisfaction for me. And based on the end credits, I choose to believe that it was more than likely the latter.
This is one movie I would enjoy watching again.
