“Green and Gold” can only sing in church. The 2025 film has the type of voice that knows what notes it has to hit and often hits them, but shows no genuine heart outside of the people, place and culture it draws its life from. Other films can sing to something bigger — an idea, a foundation, a viewpoint of the world.
“Green and Gold” takes place in 1993 and follows Buck (Craig T. Nelson) — an old farmer living outside of Green Bay, Wisconsin — and his granddaughter Jenny (Madison Lawlor) — who dreams of singing in the big city (Milwaukee, Wisconsin). Due to falling farm commodity prices, Buck is forced to bet his farm on his beloved Green Bay Packers winning the Super Bowl.
If being more “Wisconsin” is possible, the film was funded by fast food chain Culver’s, one of the state’s biggest exports.
Buck is a hard-nosed, rough-and-tumble man who has been shaped by hardship. His Christian faith is only as strong as a church service’s temporal distance from kickoff — any overhang into a noon Packer game is a grave sin. This juxtaposition is almost untenable. Audiences are supposed to view Buck as a man of traditional values and strong fortitude, yet the peaks and valleys of his life coincide with the flow of the Packers’ 1993 season.
The Packers jump off to a 1-0 start — Buck and Jenny are shown tilling the ground and laughing. The Pack falters to 1-3 — the bank manager comes knocking while wearing the most evil apparel of all (a Chicago Bears tie clip).
The relationship between football and a way of living is difficult for less-forgiving audience members to fully accept. I’m from Wisconsin, and am almost certainly the biggest Packers fan at Duke, but it is still difficult to meet the film where it is and accept that a man’s essential nature can be described by the 1993 Packers season and his community’s love of The Pack.
Alongside Buck’s struggles to keep his farm is Jenny’s desire for something more. She yearns for Milwaukee and Chicago, places shown as modern Sodom and Gommorahs, places where dreams are built and ultimately crushed.
With her artistry and goals, Jenny serves as the emotional crux of “Green and Gold.” She’s the only character with a real arc. Buck is too old and stubborn to change, and the film ends up saying that he doesn’t really have to. His money troubles miraculously disappear. His granddaughter comes home. His view of the world is proven correct.
Jenny travels to Chicago to find her big break staring back at her, the chance to have other artists sing her songs but without giving her credit. She learns, just as Buck warned her, that the world outside of home will eat you up and spit you out.
Without any emotional characterization by or from other characters, “Green and Gold” has to use Jenny’s music to muster cheap sentimentality. Rather than understand Buck and Jenny through their actions and choices, all of the pent-up emotions of a Midwestern man of the Greatest Generation are expressed in two-minute snippets of Jenny’s songs.
It’s a film always 60% of the way there. The narrative has bones but no musculature. The music has heart but no soul. The connections between football and life only contain half-truths. Along with these narrative problems, the lighting, camera positioning, thematics and plot construction scream of a director who knows and loves movies but does not know how to add more to what has already been said.
The director Lindwall is creative and versatile in his shot composition, but every attempted unique choice lacks purpose. We get close-ups of Nelson’s face as he goes about his morning workout routine and climbs onto a ladder while it is being put into place. Lindwall is making bold visual decisions and the film looks credible, but it just feels more like a director advertising his ability to construct shots than someone making a cohesive film. Lindwall knows what good movies look like, but not how they feel.
In the end, the film argues that, luckily for Buck, the real reward of being a Packers fan isn’t the league-leading 13 championships, but rather the community that unites their fans. After Buck’s financial hail mary fails, Jenny uses her star-in-the-making voice to tell the town about her grandfather’s situation, enveloping them in tears. In response, the townspeople arrive in truck droves (literally) to offer financial support to save the farm — a scene pulled straight from “It’s a Wonderful Life,” a much better film about how much one life can mean.
Sadly, there are no angels to get their wings in “Green and Gold.” We’ll just have to suffice with an offbeat sentimental rendition — every time a cow moos, a Packers fan gets his Cheesehead.
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Kadin Purath is a Trinity junior and a culture editor for Recess.