For Love of the Game
Grade: C-
Believe it or not, Rod Stewart started his career as a genuinely talented artist, creating a compelling, exciting fusion of folk and rock that was marked by good taste, passionate singing and heartfelt commitment. (I was just as shocked as you are.) Seems as if Sam Raimi is fast becoming cinema's Rod Stewart. After directing two bona fide horror classics (Evil Dead & Evil Dead II; they're much better than the titles would lead you to believe) and one of last year's best, the stunning morality play A Simple Plan, Raimi has sold out like Tickle Me Elmo.
For Love Of The Game is a pandering bore, one that takes cinema verite to yawning depths by being about as long and largely dull as a baseball game itself, and we don't even get a seventh inning stretch. Disclaimer: I follow professional sports about as closely as I follow the intricacies of Steve Forbes' presidential platform, but I'm aware that what makes any sport exciting is the element of surprise. Will he or won't he sink the basket/make the play/hit a foul/nail the goalie in the teeth? But in a movie as cheaply scripted as this one, the surprises rank up there with the recent discovery that the government may not have acted with complete nobility and cautionary discretion in Waco.
So shut up and tell me about the movie, already, you say. (Sorry, I was stalling.) While high drama is inherent even in games as predictable as the one which 40-year old pitcher Billy Chapel is playing, For Love Of The Game squanders even that by interrupting every inning with flashbacks to Chapel's life. And if you thought the game was a snooze, his backstory is excruciating. Chapel is playing the current game, what "could be" the last of his career, while mourning a breakup. Maybe if he pitches a perfect game he'll be able to prove his worth to a dismissive owner and win her back! Ya think he'll do it?
This is the kind of movie where, the evening after Chapel meets his future squeeze Jane by fixing her broken-down car on the side of the road, he says: "I was lucky to meet you. Maybe you were lucky too." Here's another, from her, as they're breaking up: "You don't need me. You and the ball and the diamond - you're a perfectly beautiful thing." Another, as she points out a souvenir baseball he gave her: "I like to hold it in my hand, because I know, somewhere.....you're doing the same thing." His catcher, as they begin his final game: "You and me, Chappy. One more time?" Had enough? So had I.
Filled with countless empty emotional gestures and dialogue that is so clunky it pains you to hear them say precisely what you were hoping they wouldn't (Chapel mutters the mantra "Close the mechanism" to block out the noise of the crowd as he pitches - close the mechanism?), the film jostles its characters into situations expressly to manipulate us. Jane catches him with another woman. He meets her improbably erudite 16 year old daughter and starts to see Jane as a Real Person. He's torn between his Love of the Game and his love for her. She gets on with her life. He sees he has taken her for granted. Et fer-chrissake cetera.
While Costner looks like an actual aging ballplayer, that's the film's only concession to reality. If A Simple Plan was Sam Raimi's "Every Picture Tells A Story", then For Love of the Game finds him asking, "D'Ya Think I'm Sexy?" Sorry, Sam.
- Jared O'Connor
MOVIES
All Content © 1997, 1998, 1999 Jared O'Connor and Michael Baker