The Rocket
The Rocket (2007) is a good enough movie to warrant serious critical attention. The story of one of hockey’s greatest players, Maurice Richard, is told with excellent acting by Francois Langlois Vallieres (young Richard) and especially Roy Dupuis (adult Richard). How fortunate to get a person who looks like Richard, speaks French and English, can actually skate well, and is a strong actor. The supporting cast, such as Julie LeBreton as his wife, is solid in the not-very-complex roles they are called on to play.
The look and feel of the 40s and 50s is captured well, including the use of stock black and white footage of Montreal. The look and feel of the hockey games are recreated faithfully. The players wear minimal equipment and look authentically small on the ice compared to the padded behemoths playing in the National Hockey League today. Several professional hockey players were involved in the movie: Sean Avery played tough guy Bob Dill, Mike Ricci played Elmer Lach, and young Vincent Lacavalier even skated like the famous Montreal Canadiens’ centre ice-man Jean Beliveau. That said about the hockey, the movie makers were in a bind. If they showed large chunks of crucial hockey games, they would create the excitement of the contest (say, like the championship fight in a boxing movie), but they would lose viewers who did not understand ice hockey. If they showed snippets of dramatic rushes on goal and had people say how fantastic The Rocket was, they would lose the excitement of a sporting contest but they would probably speak to the non-hockey viewer. The Rocket chose the latter, maybe because of the movie’s theme.
The theme of The Rocket is that ubiquitous prejudice against French Canadians was the biggest factor in Maurice Richard’s life. Thus The Rocket is more than just a sports movie. Usually when a movie can reach beyond its subject matter to a larger theme, it is all for the good. Not here. The Rocket says there was wide-spread prejudice against French Canadians on and off the ice, and we believe it because, steeped as we are in the myths of post-modernism and lobby-group politics, we instantly assume that any minority is abused and mistreated. An excellent movie would not rely on our trendy knee-jerk reaction but would rather support its claim. While the movie goes into incredible detail to portray authentic hockey and the fashions of the era, it presents little evidence to support its claim of rampant discrimination. For the oppression of French Canadian in society, we get a couple of sentence spoken by agitated Francophones: The English-speakers own (most of) the companies, and this is intolerable. As for unfair treatment on the ice, we get such things as the rhetorical question by a Rocket supporter: Why do the referees protect all the other superstars but not Richard? For all this talk of unfairness and oppression, Les Habitants (the Montreal Canadiens) won more championships than any other team in the era.