When I first heard about “Green and Gold,” which is inspired by true events and tells the story of a Wisconsin dairy farmer who risks everything by placing a bet on the Green Bay Packers winning the Super Bowl, I figured it was going to be another cheesy (pardon the pun) football-based tale along the lines of “80 for Brady” (2023), and those twin holiday TV movies from last year, the Taylor Swift/Travis Kelce ripoff romance “Christmas in the Spotlight” and the saccharine “Holiday Touchdown: A Chiefs Love Story.”
I was wrong. In all the right ways.
In fact, the football element is arguably the least interesting element in “Green and Gold.” Directed with grace and grounded style and a keen eye for outdoor visuals by Anders Lindwall, and filmed in beautiful Door County, Wisconsin, this is a warm and authentic slice of farm life, with magnificent work by the 80-year-old Craig T. Nelson, who looks every inch the world-weary Wisconsin farmer.
Add to that a solid and richly layered script, a starmaking performance by Madison Lawlor and the blessed appearance of the late great M. Emmet Walsh in the last of his more than 200 film and television roles, and we have a lovely story well-told. (We even get a cameo from the Wisconsin-centric YouTube star and comedian/author Charlie Berens as a local radio host.)
The year is 1993. Nelson is perfectly cast as the craggy-faced and obstinate Buck, who rises before dawn every morning and works the family dairy farm with the considerable help of his feisty wife, Margaret (a wonderful Annabel Armour) and his granddaughter Jenny (Madison Lawlor), who is torn between family loyalties and her dreams of becoming a singer-songwriter. (Even though it’s the 1990s, Buck sounds like he’s stuck in the 1950s when he exclaims to Jenny, “You want to be a music gypsy and you want to have a child out of wedlock, you go right ahead!” A MUSIC GYPSY?)
Buck is a big-time Green Bay Packers fan who never misses a game on TV, is almost never not wearing his Packers baseball cap and even named his cattle after players on the Pack’s 1967 Super Bowl champs, and we occasionally hear radio calls or catch archival footage of the 1993 team, but it’s not as if “Green and Gold” is primarily about fandom rituals. It comes across as something of a gimmick when the obligatory semi-heartless local banker, Jerry (Tim Frank), comes sniffing around because Buck is behind on his finances and says, “When you don’t pay your loan it becomes my land. … Farming doesn’t look like it does in children’s books. … [But] I will make a little wager with you. … If the Pack go all the way, I’ll give you another year interest-free to get caught up; if they lose, you either pay in full immediately or you sign everything over to me.”
Yikes. Buck eventually takes the bet, and it’s no spoiler alert to reveal that while the Packers made the playoffs that season, which was also the first year of the Lambeau Leap, they didn’t win the championship. I’ll leave it up to the film to explain the fate of Buck’s farm.
What’s more resonant in “Green and Gold” are the relationships, old and new. Brandon Sklenar from “1923” and “It Ends with Us” has a nice turn as a poser-cowboy country singer who comes to Wisconsin to soak up “real life” and agrees to hear Jenny’s demo tape. M. Emmett Walsh casually pockets every moment he’s onscreen as Scotty, an old friend of Buck’s.
Front and center, though, is Madison Lawlor in a natural and empathetic performance as Jenny, who is strong-willed and talented and yearns for something more, but truly loves and appreciates her grandfather as well. Ms. Lawlor has big-time, movie-star talent. (The singer Natalie Nicoles gives beautiful voice to the performances of Jenny’s songs.)
While I wouldn’t categorize “Green and Gold” as a “faith-based” film, it’s family-friendly and there are church scenes, and at one point we hear a reverend recite verses culled from Isaiah 40:28 and 40:29 (“Do you not know? Have you not heard? The Lord … gives strength to the weary and increases the power of the weak.”) as part of montage set to the Reuben and the Dark-penned “Hold Me Like a Fire” that is powerful and moving and caught me right in the heart.
Late in the film, Jenny says, “My grandpa, though he knows nothing about music, taught me harmony [and] balance … from owls and cows and mice and swallows in the rafters, even the Packers and the Bears, how it all works together.”
Even those of us who bleed Navy blue and burnt orange can embrace the messaging and the spirit of “Green and Gold.”