Twin brothers Andrew and Alex Smith wrote and directed this window on the lives of the inhabitants of a small Montana town. With the backdrop of the big sky and vast open spaces, the ambiguities of male camaraderie and intimacy are played out in the emotionally smoldering atmosphere of honky tonk bars on Saturday night or the "six-man" football games coached by Gideon Ferguson. His varsity reject quarterback recruit is high schooler Roy Chutney. Roy faces some harsh rites of passage as he comes of age and Gideon emerges as a middle-aged man who never did.
As autumn settles over the rural landscape, Roy (Ryan Gosling, The Believer), gets hit with one piece of bad news after another. His estranged father has been killed in a train accident, possibly suicide. Just after the funeral, he is cut from the football team for not being angry enough. He meets rover Gideon (David Morse, Dancer in the Dark; St Elsewhere), a guy who lives life on the fringes, making ends meet, barely, by hawking late edition newspapers to the bar-closing crowd and looking out for the diabetic town drunk, Studebaker. Gideon convinces Roy that playing football on the team he's forming for the six-man league is way better than drinking away his weekends. Joining Roy on the team is his best friend, Tracey Two Dogs, who has his own father troubles at home. The relationship that develops between Roy and Gid grows complicated with the intricacies and assumptions of male attachment. The Smith brothers based Gid on a man they knew, not well, in their own rural Montana hometown whose life was adversely affected by the community's willingness to believe unfounded rumors about him. A rich, complex performance by David Morse as Gid is a dead-on portrayal of the interior life of such a man, a guy whose life has largely passed him by without much of a chance. He's a guy who keeps on trying to make life a workable arrangement in spite of a past that has provided him with few skills for it.
The female characters are peripheral, but not unimportant. Roy's mother looks for love in all the wrong places and numbs her pain with alcohol, leaving her unavailable. Roy's first romance is with a barmaid at the saloon where Gid sings, tenderly, with a pick-up band. Skyla (Clea DuVall, 13 Conversations About One Thing, Girl Interrupted), older than her years, has developed a thick skin, but laments the inability of the men in her life to recognize intimacy. Roy's desire for Skyla kindles Gid's need for affection and confusion over his own sexuality. The overlap between male friendship and crossing an invisible line to sexual desire is devastatingly played out it in an almost unbearable encounter in Gid's shabby room.
In six-man there are no easy positions. Everyone is moving and playing hard all the time. The slaughter rule is the unofficial mercy ending to a game where one team is up by 45 points. Roy faces a similar choice when he encounters a wounded deer caught in a barbed wire fence, and again when Gid's humiliation leaves him literally out in the cold. Not really a football movie, most of the action takes place off the field. The game serves as a metaphor to explore essential elements of trust, survival, and connection among men. Reminiscent of The Last Picture Show and even in a way, Hoosiers, although less directly, the sometimes hardscrabble lives in small town America defer to the beautiful and terrible landscape, lending the upbeat ending conviction.
DVD