I went to see the international premiere of the new movie Score: A Hockey Musical at the Museum of Modern Art this evening, largely because, having spent my boyhood in Montreal, I have a residual love of the world’s fastest game (though I haven’t really followed it in years). I expected, quite frankly, that the movie would be a dud: that I would enjoy parts of it for utterly idiosyncratic reasons having largely to do with personal nostalgia, but that it would nonetheless be a world-class stinker destined to appear on the ten-worst lists for 2011 of whatever critics actually took the time to screen it. Imagine my surprise, then, when it turned out to be terrific: a musical with great music and hilarious lyrics, and a heartwarming boy-in-love-with-the-girl-next-door (and boy-staying true-to-his ideals) story that is old as the human race, all expertly done.
It will be screened again at MoMA, but there’s no deal yet for broader distribution in the U.S. Which is quite understandable: If you talk about this movie in high-concept terms — “a musical about ice hockey” — that kills it right there. Put with brutal frankness, the relatively small demographic in the United States that cares about hockey has more overlap with the audience for Battle of the Monster Trucks than with the audience for musical theater. So I would urge potential distributors not to focus on the high-concept end of it. Market the movie not as a hockey movie, but as a comedy that delivers laughs and a musical that works musically. That’s exactly what it is.
About 20 years ago the Australian movie Strictly Ballroom was a notable success in the U.S., not because we Americans have an insatiable hunger for ballroom dancing, but because the story worked on the emotions of the audience. Similarly, this new musical is a crowd-pleaser, one that requires of the viewer absolutely no knowledge of, or interest in, hockey. You will not leave this movie thinking about hockey; you’ll be thinking about how much fun movies can be.