There are two hard lessons to learn when it comes to parenting: you only get one chance to take care of someone’s childhood and what’s a random day to you contains a critical memory for a child. Becoming a parent means becoming a custodian for someone’s joy and pain, through their best days and their worst, as you do what you can to raise and guide a new life. This is what folks mean when they talk about the sacrifices they make for their kids because the moment that child arrives, their needs (emotional, psychological, nutritional) all take precedence over your own. Sometimes that means making the hard choices between what’s comfortable for yourself and what’s detrimental for them. This is only half of the true story that makes up the tale of Bobby Ratliff and his sons Robert and John which is the basis for the new Ty Roberts (12 Mighty Orphans) film You Gotta Believe, in select theaters August 30th. A story of little miracles, You Gotta Believe incorporates all that audiences love about baseball with a heartwarming and often hilarious story of underdogs refusing to quit despite the odds, balanced against a tale of loss that resonates whether you’ve been touched by terminal illness or not.
L-R: Jacob Mazeral as Mikey Valdez and Etienne Kellici as Walker Kelly in YOU GOTTA BELIEVE. Photo courtesy of Well Go USA.
Fort Worth, Texas, 2002: Robert Ratliff (Michael Cash) and his little league teammates wrap their season at the bottom of the ranks, frustrated by their losses but delighting in the fun they’ve had; meanwhile, their coaches, Bobby Ratliff (Luke Wilson) and Jon Kelly (Greg Kinnear), look ahead to the future wherein Jon may fully pass the leadership baton to Bobby due to the demands of his day job as a lawyer. The future, however, has other plans as Robert’s team is selected to participate in the upcoming Little League tournament and Bobby finds himself suddenly ill and unable to coach at full capacity. With Bobby’s health growing worse despite treatment, the team decides to use this as their rally cry, pushing forward as best they can with the possibility of going from the bottom rung of Fort Worth’s little league to the Little League World Series.
L-R: Greg Kinnear as Jon Kelly and Patrick Renna as Kliff Young in YOU GOTTA BELIEVE. Photo courtesy of Well Go USA.
With a script from Lane Garrison (12 Mighty Orphans), You Gotta Believe walks a fine line as it marries a family story of death and dying with the inspirational aspects of young adult sports films. The smart choice is narrowing the focus so that the majority of the story is through the lens of Robert and his teammates. Opting for their perspective provides moments of light-hearted humor, like trash talking future opponents in the street or current opponents on the field, instilling some of that The Bad News Bears (1976) or The Sandlot (1993) energy (itself addressed by casting Sandlot’s Patrick Renna in a small role as Fort Worth Little League overseer). This not only infuses the story with much-needed levity to counteract the heavier moments, it provides an excuse for adaptive and creative cinematography, transition techniques that don’t match a traditional sports drama, and sports-based shenanigans. In the same way that sometimes cinema takes liberties with reality, You Gotta Believe toys with truth to help audiences remember that the everyday is as important in the grand scheme of things as the big events or gestures, like singing a hype song as you tread the path to a championship title. Even when the stakes seem high, kids talking about playing a game in which they aren’t the best in their league and there’s literally nowhere to go but up, creates opportunities to remind the audience that when everything drops away and the most serious thing you have to worry about is a game, anything’s possible. More than this, it inserts some normalcy into an otherwise stressful situation both as baseball players and as 10-16-year-old kids. It’s normal for members of the team to be around the age of being interested in the others sexually, so having a horndog on the team forgetting that focusing on the game might actually help him make a positive impression on his teammate’s sister comes off naturally. It’s normal to rejoice in the absurd, like a teammate who can suddenly hit better without his glasses. In times of extreme stress, the normal things ground us and, by virtue of its perspective, You Gotta Believe is also grounded, enabling the loftier moments to hit without side-effects of saccharinity.
L-R: Sarah Gadon as Patti Ratliff and Luke Wilson as Bobby Ratliff in YOU GOTTA BELIEVE. Photo courtesy of Well Go USA.
This also empowers You Gotta Believe to dovetail into the Bobby portions of the narrative without interrupting the momentum and vice versa. Robert and his team play baseball because they love the game, and Bobby being their coach creates a two-fold connection enabling Bobby to come into and out of the story. By presenting them as parallel stories, Ty Roberts and Garrison create space for the adult/parenting elements to occur without taking away from the baseball. What this looks like is the team deciding to use Bobby as a rally point by putting his name on their hats (child’s POV) and Bobby having to choose treatment options based on the game schedule (adult’s POV). Having established that Bobby’s a hands-on parent, that he values his kids and their passions, supporting them to try things to their fullest capacity rather than being satisfied with a partial attempt, to see Bobby struggle with treatment in favor of the games makes sense — which one will Robert remember more, the treatments or the games? Will he remember his father’s illness or his presence in the stands? In the face of inscrutable odds, does one fight to preserve self in a potentially useless bid to prolong life or do you put your children first and their childhood? Because of how Ty Roberts and Garrison structure the film, emotions are given space to be felt, to be explored and identified, and it always flows in service of the characters and their respective battles.
L-R: Joaquin Roberts as Peanut and Luke Wilson as Bobby Ratliff in YOU GOTTA BELIEVE. Photo courtesy of Well Go USA.
Even where the audience might have a sense of how things go due to their awareness of this history, there’s still plenty to be engaged by during the watch. In fact, it really doesn’t matter if you know the outcome, thanks to the performances from the cast, there’s a sense of realism amid the heightened circumstances that allows the audience to get absorbed by the tale. (You can check out the real world climax here.) Another clever curveball, just when you think that Ty Roberts is going to skew too far into familiar adaptive waters, to bring the audience too close to familiarity, to breach of privacy, a choice is made to offer discretion, elevating the moment instead of using it for cheap emotion. Though there are unexpected surprises within and outside of the film (You Gotta Believe gets its name from the football (not baseball) program the sons Robert and John Ratliff co-created with Alec Mullarkey in 2007 that is still in operation), there’s nothing so egregious that it makes you question the whole of the narrative, and certainly nothing that makes the narrative false in the telling. Instead, Ty Roberts helms a story that will feel familiar to those raised on the Bears, the Sandlot kids, and even a certain bad boy from the Majors (1989; 1994), whose basis in truth only gives it more impact, a truth that sometimes the greatest gift we have to give, to others and to ourselves, is childhood.
In select theaters August 30th, 2024.
For more information, head to the official Well Go USA You Gotta Believe webpage.
Final Score: 3.5 out of 5.
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Categories: In Theaters, Reviews
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