Any Given Sunday Review
by Scott Renshaw (renshaw AT inconnect DOT com)December 19th, 1999
ANY GIVEN SUNDAY
(Warner Bros.)
Starring: Al Pacino, Cameron Diaz, Jamie Foxx, Dennis Quaid, LL Cool J, James Woods, Matthew Modine, Lawrence Taylor, Jim Brown, Aaron Eckhart. Screenplay: John Logan and Oliver Stone.
Producers: Lauren Shuler Donner, Clayton Townsend and Dan Halsted. Director: Oliver Stone.
MPAA Rating: R (profanity, nudity, drug use, adult themes, violence) Running Time: 168 minutes.
Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
In ANY GIVEN SUNDAY, Oliver Stone may have found the ideal subject for his unique brand of cinematic storytelling. Following the ups and downs of a fictional professional football team (the Miami Sharks) in a fictional professional football league (the AFFA), Stone dives into the trenches during the game sequences. Players taunt and strut as they try to win the game psychologically; an inexperienced quarterback sees the field only as a blur of colors, and hears only a blur of cacophanous sound. Coaches send in the X's and O's, but it's the kinetic fury of what goes on in the huddle and at the line of scrimmage that comes alive. Meet Oliver Stone, practitioner of smash-mouth film-making.
If ANY GIVEN SUNDAY had stayed on the field, focused on the intensity of games, it might have been a classic sports movie. Stone, however, has bigger issues on his mind -- as he inevitably, agonizingly always seems to. The film follows several individuals in the Sharks organization as they cope with the changing nature of the game. Long-time coach Tony D'Amato (Al Pacino) is hearing the jeers that his conservative approach is old news. New team owner Christina Pagniacci (Cameron Diaz) is trying to be taken seriously, and not just as the daughter of the late former owner. Veteran quarterback "Cap" Rooney (Dennis Quaid) is struggling with whether his battered body can stand up to more punishment after a back injury. And Cap's replacement, third-stringer Willie Beamen (Jamie Foxx) is finding his sudden success intoxicating, as well as poisonous to his relationships with teammates and his girlfriend (Lela Rochon).
Stone wants to cover all of this and more, to create as comprehensive a picture of modern professional football as he can cram into nearly three hours. He wants to address the rise of sports media as an infotaintment monster (personified by John C. McGinley as Jack Rose, an abrasive broadcaster more than faintly similar to Jim Rome). He wants to expose the yes-men and oh-yes-women who inflate athletes' egos so they can ride the gravy train. And he wants to juxtapose the fighting spirit of the players with the owners who use them and throw them away. He wants to do all this despite the fact that he has too much ground to cover to give any of his themes more than a superficial gloss. Stone stages confrontations without context, counting on the shock value of a player's wife belting her husband in the fact to make up for its absence of meaning. It's not enough in 1999 to intone breathlessly that pro sports is corrupted and corrupting. You must be prepared to tell a human story that feels human.
Oliver Stone, however, is all about intoning breathlessly these days. He's a director who just can't help underlining everything he puts on screen so the themes are tattooed on our foreheads. When a character refers to Vince Lombardi and Johnny Unitas, Stone cuts away to shots of Vince Lombardi and Johnny Unitas. When someone describes football players as gladiators, a T.V. will be showing BEN-HUR in the background. When characters are feuding, there are shots of gathering storm clouds. Any time ANY GIVEN SUNDAY is focused on the lives of its characters off the field, you keep hoping for an opportunity to discover something real about them. Stone, unfortunately, keeps steamrolling forward with split-second edits and changes in film stock, never offering a viewer the chance to contemplate what the story is about. Stone's message: It's about exactly what I'm gonna tell you it's about, and I'm gonna tell you over and over and over again.
All this is true, yet there are still those masterful game sequences. For Stone, the '90s have been all about experimentations in multimedia assault. ANY GIVEN SUNDAY takes a game that feels almost languid in its pacing on television and shows us the cranked-up energy of all the participants. Coaches make frantic sideline adjustments, and players look for an opponent's slightest giveaway of his intentions. Stone even does a brilliant job of splicing in the events in the owner's box, where oblivious partying and business talk shut the game out almost entirely. >From the you-are-there field level camera work to the twists on predictable sports movie heroics, Stone plants you inside the game. And that's the only time he shows much interest in getting inside anything. ANY GIVEN SUNDAY is Stone's grandiose attempt to make football a metaphor for all of human existence, when he could have settled for a perfectly splendid film about football as a metaphor for football.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 grid ironies: 6.
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