"I will play in the National Hockey League. I will play in the National Hockey League."
These are the boy's transfixed whispers, the obsessed mantra of a midget hockey goaltender and the focus of Goalie, a short film airing Friday and Monday afternoons at the Vancouver International Film Festival.
Directed by Daniel Nearing, the short black-and-white film appears with seven other moody shorts under the title "Choose the Right Thing?" and screens at 1: 30 p.m., Oct. 7 and at 12: 40 p.m., Oct. 10 at Empire Granville 7.
Goalie is based on a work by writer Rudy Thauberger, who penned the short story in Vancouver in the late '80s. It has since been anthologized more than 20 times, most recently in Words on Ice: A Collection of Hockey Prose.
Thauberger's rich and complex story is written in the second person: "You watch him play. You sit in the stands with his mother, freezing, in an arena filled with echoes."
Writing in the first person lacked authenticity for the Calgary-born author, who played casual street hockey but watched his brother compete seriously between the posts. He wanted to get inside the head of a goalie.
"They're really the most unusual member of a hockey team, they're so different from everybody else. They're always considered eccentric. I wanted to get an insight into that," he said, noting that ambitious teenage athletes often deal with immense pressure during important, formative years.
"The goalie is the guy on the hockey team that grows up. too quickly. All of the responsibility is on his shoulders."
When Nearing was interested in directing Goalie and adapting it for the screen, he contacted Thauberger. The two men are childhood friends and collaborated for Chicago Heights, a compelling coming-of-age story also adapted from a work of fiction and praised by influential film critic Roger Ebert.
Nearing, who now lives in Chicago, remembered Thauberger had written a screenplay for Goalie, although the author trashed the first early effort.
"I'd completely forgotten I'd written a script back in the '90s," said Thauberger, who had Nearing send him a copy of the work he hadn't kept himself. There was no way his friend was using the script, he said. "It's terrible. I re-wrote the whole thing."
In the role of the unnamed midget goaltender, the filmmakers cast the 15year-old goaltender for the AAA Illinois state hockey team, Tanner Creel.
"We had to make a decision to have either an actor who could play goal or a goalie who was able to act," said Thauberger, describing Creel as "an NHL prospect," a credible detail that adds authenticity to a story about a wouldbe future sports star. "His dad plays his dad and his mom plays his mom."
The film is not a documentary, but Thauberger was moved by Creel's resemblance to his own brother, the netminder who inspired the story. He also pointed out Creel's well-adjusted, happy demeanour and the close bond he has with his parents.
"They turned out to be really good actors. They're playing a father and son who are estranged from each other and they actually have a great relationship."
For Thauberger, who teaches screenwriting at the Vancouver Film School, writing about hockey is familiar territory. He penned Rhino Brothers, a 2002 family saga about a widowed matriarch hell bent on raising one of her four sons to succeed in the NHL.
It may be the most depressing hockey movie ever made, he said. But, "Hockey players really responded to that. There is an element that's sort of a grim part of hockey. I love the game but at the same time I think there is a dark aspect to it."
He thinks Goalie, especially the short story so well-read in high school classrooms, is popular because it's downbeat. "It is a celebration but it's actually a very somber story of someone who is very isolated and lonely and unable to communicate with people and talk about this experience. I think that, more than anything, appeals to people.
"Other than it being hockey."
Twitter: @MHStewart
