Goal oriented

Elisabeth Shue gets me. Like her, soccer is in my blood.

My grandfather, Dave Page, was recruited to come to Massachusetts from Scotland to begin a pro career that included being on the losing end of a landmark national championship game in 1920.

Still, I never played on a soccer team until I was well into my 30s. That's because when I was in high school, girls played field hockey, and we really didn't envy the one or two females who wandered onto the boys' soccer field in the brave new world of Title IX. They were curiosities at best, disrespected and unincorporated at a time of life when fitting in was survival.

Shue understands this.

She's nodding sympathetically as we sit in a Boston hotel with her brother, Andrew Shue, chatting about the days before Mia Hamm made corner kicks cool.

The Shues' new movie, "Gracie" (opening Friday), is a family drama inspired by Elisabeth's soccer-obsessed New Jersey childhood in the 1970s, when she was the only girl playing on teams built for boys. That seemed "natural in a lot of ways," she recalls, because she'd been raised on backyard scrimmages with her dad, a former Harvard University team captain, and three athletic brothers poised to follow in his cleat marks. Still, like so many teenage girls, she gave up on her dream sport amid a confusing whirlwind of hormones and social pressures.

"The reason why I actually quit, which is something I really regret, is that once I was in junior high school I did start caring what the other girls thought of me," the movie star admits. "And I wanted the boys on the team to take notice of me as a girl."

Many females have been there, done the same, which is why that's not what happens in "Gracie."

Directed by Elisabeth's husband, Davis Guggenheim (fresh off his stunning success with "An Inconvenient Truth"), the 43-year-old actress's latest work takes a mixture of tragedy and triumph from the real-life Shue family album and spins it into a fictional story about a girl who refuses to be distracted from her goal. Gracie, played by plucky Carly Schroeder ("Mean Creek," "Firewall"), is determined to make the lineup of her high school's all-boys team as a tribute to her deceased older brother.

Her parents (Elisabeth Shue and Dermot Mulroney) need considerable convincing, and her friends, would-be teammates, and coaches are even less enthusiastic. But Gracie finds herself being called off the bench in the final seconds of the big game anyway, maybe because that actually happened to Andrew in high school, or perhaps because no one wants to see a movie where the heroine just walks away and then later becomes an Academy Award-nominated actress.

What is true about "Gracie" is its heart and soul: the emotional impact of a young life suddenly taken, all the lessons learned, the carefully re-created details of a suburban New Jersey existence, and the soccer -- definitely the soccer. When former Dartmouth College and Los Angeles Galaxy player (not to mention "Melrose Place" hunk) Andrew Shue first imagined it, this was a movie focused on his oldest brother, Will, who excelled at the game before dying in a freak accident in 1988. It was Guggenheim who suggested folding in the story of Elisabeth, known as Lisa to her family and friends.

"Lisa really was the underdog in our family, and I think all of us were kind of oblivious to it," explains Andrew, 40, who produced and acts in the $10-million independent film scripted by Karen Janszen and Lisa Marie Petersen. "Being in this all-male world and having to figure out your way and find your self-worth and be noticed at the same time was very hard, and I think girls today are still dealing with that."

Not just girls, apparently. As a cofounder of ClubMom and CafeMom, fast-growing online social networks often described as MySpace for mothers, Andrew beams when he talks about giving women an unintimidating way to connect and exchange ideas. That business, and raising his three kids back in New Jersey, makes him happier than anything he ever did while living in LA . So even though the key message in "Gracie" is "you can do anything," the addendum in real life is that some things are more worthwhile than others.

Elisabeth's career has been a case in point.

Since charming viewers with family fare such as "Adventures in Babysitting" and then vaulting to stardom as a heart-of-gold hooker in "Leaving Las Vegas," things have gone from not all bad ("The Trigger Effect") to worse ("Hollow Man") to two Dakota Fanning movies in a row ("Hide and Seek" and "Dreamer") . Wherever "Gracie" falls in that mix, it is at least a labor of love, and the actress gave a lot of herself -- including arriving on set just eight weeks after giving birth to her third child -- to see it done right.

"When we got [on location in] New Jersey, we had a girls' night, just me and her," remembers Schroeder. "She took me to the field where she first played soccer, she showed me a little tree house that she used to play in, she took me to the pizza parlor where she and her friends used to hang out, and she really made me feel like I was a part of her life.

"But she also told me, 'I don't want you to play me, I want you to play yourself.' So that definitely made it a lot easier."

Having beaten out many experienced athletes as well as fellow actresses, Schroeder still had to train long hours for 12 weeks to get in shape for the role. By the time cameras rolled, she could do a dozen chin ups and move well enough that she only carries a few lingering bruises from playing most of her unfailingly authentic scenes without shin guards.

Andrew, who these days coaches youth soccer and has his own meticulously groomed backyard field for five-a-side games, says the only good sports films are accurate sports films. And his isn't the kind of family that settles for second-rate efforts.

Far from the struggling, blue-collar Bowen clan portrayed in "Gracie," the Shues' elite academic resume extends to mom, a Bay State native who was attending Wellesley College when she met her Harvard-educated (now ex) husband; Elisabeth, who also took classes at Wellesley before finally wrapping up her own Harvard degree a few years ago; and the youngest scion, John, yet another Harvard man who lives in the Boston area and contributed his entrepreneurial skills to getting this movie made.

They seem like a pretty smart group. So can any of them tell us why girls in this country are latching onto soccer with a "Bend It Like Beckham" passion that eludes most other Americans, even now that David Beckham himself is playing on American soil?

Andrew: "I hate to say it, but maybe the girls know something that the boys don't know. . . . There's a reason why the rest of the world loves [soccer] and will live and die for it. I think girls are . . . "

Elisabeth: "More evolved."

They laugh.

If there ever was a time when "Lisa" was a true underdog, those years have long since passed. These days she's confident and happy to be growing older, in part because "I think the roles that I can play now are just so much richer," she says convincingly.

On the other hand, no one should confuse her character in "Gracie" with an attempt to play her own real-life mother.

"That would be very dangerous territory," she cautions. Even for a trailblazer.

Janice Page can be reached at jpage@globe.com. For more on movies, go to boston.com/ae/ movies/blog.