Summary
We see teenagers at the beach playing various beach sports. Viola and her boyfriend, Justin, play soccer and celebrate a victory. They kiss on the sand and he tells her that she's "probably already better than half the guys on [his] team."
The scene shifts and we see Viola walking with her teammates, talking about what colleges they want to play sports for. Suddenly, Viola notices that the lacrosse team is playing on their field, as one of her teammates breaks the news that their school, Cornwall Academy, has just cut the women's soccer team.
Upset and determined to get some answers, Viola approaches the boys' soccer coach and requests that he let them try out for the boys' team. The coach explains that the first game of the school year is against Illyria, a rivalry game, and they have to win. Just then, Justin walks up and asks what's going on. The coach tells the boys that the girls want to try out and then asserts that girls just aren't as strong as boys—"it's a scientific fact." Viola confronts Justin, the captain, about the fact that he told her she was better than half his teammates. "I never said that," he says. Betrayed, Viola breaks up with him.
Viola goes home, listening to music, with her hood up. A girl with a tiny purse, Monique, mistakes Viola for her brother, Sebastian, from behind and is surprised to find that she is Viola. "God, you and your brother look scary alike from the back. I think it's your total lack of curves," Monique says to Viola, and Viola sarcastically greets her brother's girlfriend. Monique tells Viola to tell Sebastian to call her.
Inside her house, Viola's mother excitedly shows Viola some gowns she's picked out for her. "Mom, have I not told you a thousand times I have no interest in being a debutante," Viola says, exasperated. Viola tells her that the soccer team got cut and she broke up with Justin, before trudging up to her room.
Upstairs, Viola tells her brother, Sebastian, that Monique was looking for him. He surreptitiously throws his bags out the window, telling Viola that their mother thinks he's staying at their father's house, and their father thinks he's staying with their mother. He then says, "In two days they both think that I'm going away to school," before revealing that his band got a slot to play at a music festival in London, so he's sneaking away for a few weeks. He asks Viola to cover for him while he's gone and tell the school he's sick, before climbing out the window.
Viola pretends that she's talking on the phone with Sebastian when her mom comes in to show her a debutante dress. Frustrated that Viola doesn't want to be more feminine, Viola's mother says, "Sometimes I think you might as well just be your brother," and leaves the room. Suddenly, Viola notices a picture in which Sebastian is wearing the hat she's currently wearing, and holds it up next to her reflection. "If you can't join them, beat them."
Viola goes to a hairdresser with her friends and asks the hairdresser, Paul, to turn her into her brother. "I'm gonna go to Illyria as Sebastian, I'm gonna make the boys' soccer team there, and in 12 days, I'm gonna beat the Cornwall boys team." Paul is skeptical, but Viola insists it will work.
We see a montage in which Paul tries different mustaches on Viola as rock music plays. We see her walking down the street behind various men, mimicking their walks and attitudes. Her friends help her dress up as a boy, binding her breasts, and as she goes off to school, she puts some tampons in her bag.
As she leaves the house, Viola's mother stops her and tells her she has to stay and spend time with her. Viola insists that she's going to her dad's house so that she can spend more time with Monique, who will teach her about being more feminine. With this information, Viola's mom changes her tune and gets excited for her.
We see Viola arriving at Illyria, dressed in a boys' school uniform. "Wait, are you sure I can do this?" Viola asks Paul, and freaks out for a moment about whether she can go through with the plan. He tells Viola to do her best boy voice, to strut, and to hawk a loogie, all of which she does. "Be a good boy," Paul says, tossing Viola a soccer ball.
Viola—now Sebastian—walks into the school. People stare at her as she walks into school and she finds herself in the middle of a marching band procession, disoriented and confused. Inside, she looks for her locker, telling herself, "I'm a badass hunky dude!" She passes a dorm room where a boy is playing cello, then walks down a bustling hallway where boys are engaged in all kinds of hyper-male horseplay.
When she finally reaches her room, she finds three boys, one very attractive and shirtless, and attempts to blend in. The shirtless one introduces himself as Duke Orsino, her roommate, and the other boys are Toby and Andrew, who live next door. "Seriously, how old are you?" one of them asks, and Viola tells them she skipped a couple of grades. She asks when soccer tryouts are, and Duke tells her that he's a striker, while Andrew and Toby are halfbacks.
As she unpacks, tampons fall out of Viola's boot and the boys notice. "I get really bad nose bleeds," Viola says, and sticks one of her nose to demonstrate. The boys laugh at her and call her a freak.
The scene shifts to the soccer field, where an intimidating coach, Coach Dinklage, surveys the new tryouts. When he says that they will be playing shirts versus skins, Viola informs him that she will need to play for the shirts, as she is "allergic to the sun." The coach belittles her for this request, then tells her she can be a shirt.
They play soccer. At the end, Dinklage announces who is in the first and who is in the second string. He puts Viola in the second string, much to her disappointment. In the locker room, Viola is terrified at the prospect of having to take a shower with her teammates, but just in time, Coach Dinklage calls her to the principal's office.
Alone in the principal's office, Viola is sure that they know that she's a girl, when she is struck by an idea to infiltrate the files and take out Sebastian's. She hastily goes to the filing cabinet and tries to find his file. As she does, the principal, Horatio Gold, enters the office, and she slams the file shut, getting her breast binding caught in the drawer in the process. She tries to act casual as Gold introduces himself, singing a welcome song.
Analysis
The film establishes itself as a teen romantic comedy from the start. Released in 2006, on the tail end of a teen movie boom, She's the Man focuses on high school and the dramatic foibles of contemporary high school students. The opening credits feature an up-tempo, carefree rock song, with shots of high schoolers on the beach playing sports. The tone is fast-paced and high-spirited, setting the viewer down in an energetic teenaged world where worries are scarce and life is fun.
The uncomplicated fun soon gets disrupted by a charged gender dispute. After the girls' soccer team gets cut by the school, Viola and her cohort demand a chance to play with the boys, but the coach insists that girls are inherently not as athletic as boys. This goes against exactly what Viola's boyfriend, Justin, said in the previous scene, when he told Viola that she was better than half the boys on his team. Before long, a dispute about the athletic potential of the genders arises, and bold assertions are made about how biological sex determines ability. Men support other men before they support women, the movie suggests, as we watch Justin revoke his endorsement of Viola as soon as his teammates are around to hear it.
Viola's frustrations about the fact that she's not taken more seriously as a girl, as well as her lack of interest in the feminine pursuits that her mother has in mind for her, leads her to see an unusual opportunity when her brother Sebastian sneaks out of the country for a few weeks. She devises a plan to dress up like him while he's away so that she can play on the boys' soccer team. The fact that she does not fit into the expectations placed on her leads Viola to seek opportunity in an unlikely situation; if she cannot be respected as a girl, she will simply become a boy.
This central premise is comic and complicated. High school is traditionally a time in which teenagers are encouraged to solidify their sexuality and differentiate in stark ways based on their gender identities, so by posing as a member of the opposite gender, Viola subverts this tradition. The comedy of the film comes from the fact that she is willing to go so far simply to play soccer as a girl. Her simple feminist agenda—to be taken seriously as a female athlete—is dependent on an elaborate and subversive charade.
A lot of comic mileage comes out of Viola's struggle to fit in with her masculine peers and the clumsiness with which she does so. Within minutes of moving into her dorm room, her tampons fall out of her boot and she must come up with a suitably masculine excuse for why she has them, going so far as to stick one up her nose, citing "bad nosebleeds." Her attempt to play it cool is met with laughter from her roommate and his friends. Later, she must tell the coach that she is allergic to the sun to get out of taking her shirt off during practice, and during "shower time" in the locker room, her eyes dart around the room in terror as escalating dramatic music plays.
