' ' Cinema Romantico: Some Drivel On...For Love of the Game

Wednesday, October 09, 2024

Some Drivel On...For Love of the Game

The historical record shows that 1999 was a year chock full of great movies; “For Love of the Game” was not one of them. It was the odd bookend to Kevin Costner’s baseball trilogy, sort of to “Bull Durham” and “Field of Dreams” as “Heaven and Earth” was to “Platoon” and “Born on the Fourth of July,” or something. Director Sam Raimi’s foray into big studio filmmaking might have been reduced to the dustbin of history if not for the MLB Network needing programming to fill airtime, and it works better on TV than it does as a complete, beginning-to-end big screen experience. If you just saw the baseball scenes, fortified by the one-part majestic, one-part mawkish Basil Poledouris musical score, it might come across like a feature length version of those old highlights they play on the scoreboard in baseball stadiums between innings. Trouble is, “For Love of the Game” is two movies in one. It is a baseball movie wherein aging Detroit Tigers ace Billy Chapel (Costner) pitches an improbable perfect game in Yankee Stadium in the twilight of his career and it is a romance movie that lives out as flashbacks in Billy’s head during the perfect game as he recalls his on-again, off-again, up and down relationship with Jane Aubrey (Kelly Preston). The screenplay by Dana Stevens was based on a posthumous novel by Michael Shaara published in 1991, but the finished product still feels like an attempt to replicate the ultra-successful formula of “Jerry Maguire” three years prior. But whereas that rom com’s fusion of sports and romance felt seamless, the two disconnected halves of “For Love of the Game’s” so badly fail to mesh it doesn’t just feel uneven, it feels lopsided. 


Chapel’s perfect game is a pressure cooker of a plot. It’s not just his relationship with Jane that is on the rocks, it’s that the Tigers owner (Brian Cox) is on the verge of selling the team, and that the new owners want to trade away Billy, meaning he has a deadline to decide whether he wants to retire or play on against the odds. And it is why Raimi’s clever sound and visual effects to convey how Billy blocks out the crowd’s cacophony on the mound double as an effective metaphor for how the mound becomes his place to both escape and focus. Those effects, meanwhile, demonstrate that even if “For Love of the Game” is a story-driven movie, Raimi makes an imprint. There is a solid rhythm to scenes on the diamond, especially when it focuses on in-depth at-bats, like one between Billy and his ex-Tiger pal who has been traded to the Yankees, and one with his foremost slugging Yankee nemesis that is like those old pitch-by-pitch breakdowns Tim McCarver used to do on TV broadcasts but set to a bluesy riff. And even when the sentimentality threatens to overwhelm, it all hangs together because these sequences believe in their own sense of grandeur as much “Field of Dreams” believed in its. That is helped in so small part by beloved baseball announcer Vin Scully playing himself calling Chapel’s perfect game by convincingly redressing every platitude the script espoused in his famously charismatic and relaxed tenor. 

In the screenplay’s melodramatic twists and turns, like Billy injuring his arm in a woodcutting accident, the romantic subplot suggests something Harlequin-inspired. And if “For Love of the Game” had believed in this as much as it believed in the baseball, maybe it all could have congealed into something entertainingly histrionic. It doesn’t, though, and that causes the two-hours-and-nineteen-minutes to feel ungainly. Costner’s sometimes goofy, even giggly, performance is like a Guy in the variety of Dave Barry’s Guide to Guys, and much more akin to a protagonist in a dumb romantic comedy than a weepy melodrama. Likewise, Preston seems to exist in a dumb romantic comedy too, unable to turn her myriad overwrought lines of dialogue into anything substantial. In fairness, Preston doesn’t have much to play given that her character essentially exists as a device for Billy to decide what’s more important, baseball or life. Worst of all, there is no heat between Costner and Preston, none, zilch, and that means there is no tension when the whole relationship arc is meant to turn on the tension between them. Well, I shouldn’t say no tension. 

One of the melodramatic turns involves Jane’s young daughter (Jena Malone) running away to see her good-for-nothing father and Billy being dispatched to bring her home. When he asks her daughter’s name, Jane replies, “Freedom,” waits a beat and then says, “Scared you didn’t I? It’s Heather.” Which, oh my god, what? On the other hand, this bizarre bolt from the blue suggests the age-old divide between the hippies and jocks, just as isolated bits like Jane’s career as a vaguely defined editor and a moment between the two at an art gallery evoke the age-old divide between aesthetes and philistines. You see it in their Meet Cute on the side of a New York expressway where Billy pulls up to help Jane when her car won’t start. Can a guy in shorts, tennis shoes, and a windbreaker and a woman in a hoodie, floral print dress, and combat boots really fall in love? I am honestly not even sure the screenplay is conscious of it, but hey, that right there is your ultimate Harlequin romance. 

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