An Involving Examination of Men Gone Wild, but Too Anthropological

Rating: 7/10 (24 September 2005)

"Green Street Hooligans" is a visually involving attempt at exploring the phenomenon of violent English football fans, but falls down through the story choice of approaching it through a cross-cultural and class perspective.
Perhaps with an eye on the American movie market, co-writer/director Lexi Alexander chose not to use the docudrama style of "Bloody Sunday" in trying to understand how a violent incident can explode, but instead almost anthropologically uses the viewpoint of a fish out of water participant observer. That distance is emphasized with an unnecessary and melodramatic voice-over, however, the angle of reporters seeking to go into this alternative universe is not unfounded paranoia as I remember reading a scandal some years ago about a "journo" who did successfully go undercover with such a group and how shocking his reports were.
We see middle class milquetoast, expelled Harvard student Elijah Wood as "Matt Buckner" arrive in England with a belly full of family and class reasons to have pent-up anger at the world. He is accidentally drawn into a completely different world by a plot contrivance that is a poignant fulcrum to the film and its most interesting invention, his rebellious older sister's marriage to a guy who in any other British movie (and just about every other TV show or movie Marc Warren, as the husband, has been in) would be called "her bit of rough." No wonder he keeps calling her his "angel." It's a boundary-challenging, transgressive relationship that we haven't seen much in the movies since "A Street Car Named Desire" and I would have liked to see more.
While Wood's Americanness provides the excuse for the necessary translations of slang, sports nomenclature and social descriptions that I presume the British audience will find redundant, an American audience is more used to the innumerable movies about gangs (from the metaphorical "The Warriors" or even alternative inner city groupings like in "Rize") where race or ethnicity is a crucial element in male bonding and where the violence is expressed through guns rather than these primitive fists and whatever is handy. With the probably not incidental perspective of a female director, it also implies that movies like "Romper Stomper" that assumed a political sheen to such activities misunderstand the pack instinct. With those factors removed, what you mostly have is testosterone on adrenaline reorganized around "firms" that use sports teams as an excuse for their existence, so it's like "Fight Club" crossed with "Friday Night Lights" and "Rollerball." The editing emphasizes the emotional process of violence over its results in order to get across the participants' euphoria.
This film may be about as authentic as "Hustle & Flow" is about rappers and pimps, but as a fable of men gone wild it is involving. I could understand the dialog so ipso facto that must mean that the actors weren't speaking with authentic class accents. It comes as a shock to casually see that the hooligans are all in fact gainfully employed. For guys who emphasize their heterosexuality, we only see one in an ongoing relationship with a female, though, like with "Lords of Dogtown," we get a hint of admiring groupies. Charlie Hunnam's exaggeratedly swaggering alpha male is charismatic, if overly theatrical. The film is insightful at examining the sociology of the groups, showing how the beta male tries to prove himself to the alpha male by ratcheting up the action and distinguishing genuinely disturbed individuals that even the participants identify as "an animal."
The recurrences of issues of family ties, father to son, brother to brother, emphasizes that male tribalism crosses class lines, as queasily indicated in the ambiguous ending. It misses an opportunity to link these goings on to "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room" by oddly and somewhat scarily transferring the hooligan behavior to middle class vengeance on the upper class.
Other than the chillingly recurring team cheers that recall "A Clockwork Orange," the song selections are good but are very limited, with repeat selections by one band, I guess due to music clearance costs, with, oddly, no metal and only one hip hop number, over the closing credits.
This film almost makes a case for a mandatory draft of young men and limited wars to channel inevitable male aggression in groups.