Green and Gold is a sports movie in which the hero isn’t an athlete, but rather a Midwestern farmer. Like Field of Dreams, the plot involves the threat of foreclosure of a farm. But while the hero of Field of Dreams and his wife were ex-hippies from the 1960s who turned to farming in the 1980s and did direct battle with school board book banners, the values of Green and Gold are much more conservative and in love with the virtues of rural heartland life.
Rather than that of Ray Kinsella, this movie’s more in line with the worldview of Ray’s father, the guy so stubborn that he allowed one stray remark about “Shoeless Joe” Jackson to kick off a permanent estrangement from his son. Overall, Green and Gold is a bunch of hokum, but at least well-meaning hokum, Supposedly “inspired by true events,” Green and Gold centers on Buck (Craig T. Nelson), a fourth-generation farmer in rural Wisconsin whose farm is struggling. Facing possible foreclosure, a smarmy bank officer makes him a half-hearted offer: If the Green Bay Packers win the Super Bowl that year, he can keep the farm for another year, interest-free. If they don’t, the bank gets the farm immediately. Buck takes him up on it.
This strikes me as unethical, even by the historical standards of rural bankers, especially at a time when sports gambling was still a decade or two away from becoming legal. Bank officers, even now, aren’t typically allowed to function like crooked bookies. But we’re meant to go with it, and I was much less invested in the football bet plot than the subplot involving Buck’s daughter Jenny (Madison Lawlor), an aspiring singer-songwriter who feels the pull of city life. She’s also looking at potential romance with a fellow busker (Brandon Sklenar, of last year’s scandalous, Superfund site of a movie, It Ends With Us.) Also in the film is M. Emmet Walsh, in his final role following his death last spring.
Craig T. Nelson had another well-known role in a Midwestern football-related project, playing the coach of the fictional Minnesota State Screaming Eagles on the sitcom Coach. It’s a very different role though; his Coach Hayden Fox was kind of a jerk, while Buck’s more monosyllabic and not as much of a personality.
As for the football part, Green and Gold had the cooperation of both NFL Films and the Green Bay Packers (and also, strangely, Culver’s, the Wisconsin-based fast-casual chain that helped sponsor the film as part of its farmer appreciation initiative.) We see some game footage, most of which looks like the camera is filming an old tube TV.
I was bothered by how these characters are supposed to be obsessed fans of the Pack, but we never hear them talk about Brett Favre, Reggie White or Sterling Sharpe. I knew Packers fans from Wisconsin in the 1990s, and they never shut up about Favre. It’s established that Buck named his cows after players on the Packers’ 1967 championship team, but he doesn’t seem to have any opinions about the contemporary players.
Green and Gold is described as a “faith-based” movie, but it’s only that at the margins; we see the characters in church a couple of times, and there’s an over-arching philosophy of being good to your fellow man, to the point where it essentially lifts its ending from It’s a Wonderful Life. But just as Roger Ebert described Field of Dreams as “a religious picture, in which the religion is baseball,” Green and Gold is that when it comes to football.