Feb. 22, 2012 - Issue #853: Folkways

Goon

Mike Dowse on Goon, the hockey-film genre and the place of violence in Canada's sport

'Let's not mince words," says Mike Dowse. "You have a chimpanzee as a goaltender, or a fairy with wings. It's embarrassing how bad hockey movies have been. We wanted to set the bar a little higher."
Goon, written by actor Jay Baruchel and Superbad scenarist Evan Goldberg, is the latest comedy from the director of FUBAR, It's All Gone Pete Tong and FUBAR 2, and it does indeed take the sorry hockey movie up a notch or two. It's the story of a big-hearted brute named Doug Glatt (American Pie's Seann William Scott) who, being "touched by the fist of God," goes from bouncing to bashing heads on the ice virtually overnight. Not everything in Goon flies—the love story especially feels compulsory, lazily slapped together and riddled with tiresome tropes—but most of what transpires between the players is both lovingly imbued with keen detail and hysterically funny. It's a go-for-it movie for hosers.

Dowse spoke with Vue Weekly by phone from Winnipeg, where Goon was shot, and where Dowse was screening the movie for local cast and crew.
 

VUE WEEKLY: You saw Goon in its second draft. What in particular drew you to the script?
MICHAEL DOWSE: The main thing was the character of Doug Glatt. He really spoke to me. I find myself attracted to these odd, Chauncey the Gardener-type characters. Rocky Balboa would be another prototype. Or Lenny from Of Mice and Men. I liked the central dichotomy of Doug, that he was so nice and soft and warm, but also capable of such violence.
 

VW: It's one of the hardest things for an actor to do, I think, to intelligently convey a lack of intelligence. Or at least naiveté.

MD: It's very hard to pull that off properly. But after meeting Seann and seeing the breadth of his work, you realize the guy's a great actor. Not enough people are aware of that because his Stifler character has canonized him in a certain way. As soon as we met it was one of those rare things where within 20 seconds I knew that no one else could play this part. Seann carries this film. He keeps the emotional core ticking.
 

VW: I went into Goon ready to see a hockey movie, if that's even a genre. But I quickly realized that, in a way, what I was really watching was a gladiator movie. Gladiators on skates!

MD: [Laughs] That's a good analogy. Either way, you know, we've all seen this story before, whether we're thinking of gladiators or athletes. A guy comes from nothing and finds his place in the world ...
 

VW: There's a sort of polemic to Goon regarding all the rhetoric surrounding violence in hockey, how the industry condemns the violence but once that condemnation has been aired it becomes a form of tacit consent. There's this sense that we need to wring our hands over the fighting while knowing perfectly well that fights are integral to the allure.
MD: It's definitely not a black and white topic. It's as complex as any player. You're right, of course. Would I want my son to get into a hockey fight? No. Would I be the first to stand up if a fight breaks out during a Habs game? Probably. But there's more to the issues currently being debated than just the fighting itself. There's drug issues, depression issues, exit strategies. My opinion is that the guys who play the game and live the game are dealing with this, and I think they're doing a good job. This summer was a bit of a wake up call, but they've had drug counselling for years and they're doing what they can to help these guys out when they leave the game.
 

VW: The savagery of hockey is such an important part of Goon, but so is the sentimentality. I think a lot of the comedy lives in that balance. This whole idea of a goalie with a photo of his mom plastered on his helmet, right?
MD: [Laughs] Comedy sort of permeates hockey, more than any other sport, I think. I find that hockey players don't take themselves as seriously as maybe a baseball or basketball player would. They just seem to rib each other all the time. When you look at a show like 24/7, they're very funny with each other.

VW: Much of what's funny in Goon is physical or gestural or about manners. But there's also much that's dependent on a subtle understanding of the vernacular. It's not like all your actors come from the same place, it's not like they're all Canadians even, or like hockey talk is their native language. Was it a challenge to get your cast to all sound like they were from the same brotherhood?
MD: For sure. There's very simple things you can do, little tricks like putting "y"s at the end of everybody's names. Smitty, Parky, whatever. It also helps that we're shooting long hours and we have all the these actors that we've flown in from all over, but then we surround them with real Winnipeg hockey players. So I think it all happened very organically. We played hockey with these guys and they quickly became part of the family. But Doug has his own cadence. That was a really fun thing to develop with Seann. Just this idea that he's overly polite all the time, that he's painfully nice, that he's incapable of coming up with comebacks—and then can snap and beat the crap out of somebody. It creates interesting rhythms.
 

VW: You've got a pretty good record with sequels so far. Are you thinking about revisiting Goon? It seems to lend itself to more story.

MD: I think so too. There's more that can be done with the Glatt character. And there's more than can be done with the changing role of the goon in the game. We can hit these hot-button issues a little harder. And I think there's room to make things more poignant, to show the struggles these guys go through. Goon is the story of the start of this guy's career, and there's an opportunity to show how this kind of career might end. vueweekly.com comments: powered by Disqus