In the Middle
www.inthemiddlefilm.co.ukAsk any young boy who he wants to be when he grows up, chances are he dreams of being a professional football player. This standing cliché continues to hold water despite the advent of social media stardom slowly dominating the long-term aspirations of youngsters these days. However, nobody ever wants to become a football referee. And as Greg Cruttwell’s documentary In The Middle shows, this is likely because a referee is not so much a career, as it is a calling.
Composed as a bouquet of interviews with a diverse group of individuals – from retired players and Sunday hobbyists to lifelong professionals and passionate lovers of the sport – Cruttwell's new film reaches beyond the scope of a familiar career-day documentary designed primarily to educate the viewer on the topic. In fact, the filmmakers simply assume the viewer has at least a rudimentary understanding of the sport and simply point the camera at their subjects while allowing them to speak freely, without any interference or off-screen narration. Consequently, the finished product may come across as narratively shapeless, though it may have as well been by design.
The idea of planting the film’s point of view squarely on the subjects’ shoulders is an effective tactic in the sphere of documentary filmmaking, deployed particularly well in the context of shaping a movie around a specific character or a related point of interest. However, In the Middle stretches the parameters of this methodology to allow the camera to freely hop between its multiple subjects and – without any structural interference from the filmmaker – let them tell their own stories, introduce themselves and tell the world what they need to get off their chests.
In doing so, this narratively undefined conglomeration of interviews with a group of football refs (a cursory Google search also suggests that a collective noun for referees is an “interference”), takes a different kind of shape and reorganizes itself around the uniform of a referee as a symbol of something greater than its on-pitch importance. To each of the subjects found and interviewed in the course of making this movie, the uniform means something different. For some it is an avatar of authority they are allowed to express while donning it on the field. For others it is synonymous with indispensable responsibility for making sure the sport they love can even take place. For others yet it is a confidence boost, or even a unifiable identity behind which they can hide their personal anxieties and pursue meaningful actualization.
In a way, this whole film eventually becomes a treaty on the power the uniform of the referee may confer upon the wearer. Depending on who is asked, the characteristic matching set of clothes may be seen as equivalent to a Batman costume behind which the person may wish to hide away their identity and avail themselves of the indisputable power afforded by the rules of the game, or even an equivalent of the Loki mask from the 1994 movie Mask, which doesn’t imbue the individual with special powers but rather amplifies their own character traits.
Taken together, In the Middle harbors a fascinating conversation within the confines of a conventional narrative manifold, as it makes functional use of the form of a talking head documentary without succumbing to workaday familiarity and therefore surrendering its own character. And even within the conversation itself about the implicit potential energy residing within the uniform of a football referee and its capability to empower the wearer in many ways, the filmmakers left enough room for their subjects to bring out their own personal colors.
However, what they may have missed out on was an opportunity to extend their scope and incorporate a bit more commentary that could be extracted from the circumstance of having been caught out by the global pandemic. It can only be assumed that the film had been coming together when the lockdowns struck, but the inclusion of lockdown-related commentaries as a post-script feels like a wasted opportunity to interrogate just how important football is to the subjects by way of showing in greater detail what happens when it is temporarily taken away from them. Granted, it might have necessitated a more substantial re-engineering of the narrative structure to the whole film, but it would have surely been interesting to learn a bit more about this facet of the story the filmmakers chose to touch upon only in passing.
Nevertheless, In the Middle is a perfectly accessible piece of documentary filmmaking that puts its focus on exploring its characters as opposed to openly educating the public on its convictions. Consequently, it allows its own narrative to break through the boundaries of the intended subject matter and lets the viewer interrogate the thematic depth lurking beneath its epidermis.
