Any Given Sunday Review
by Stephen Graham Jones (stephen AT cinemuck DOT com)January 9th, 2000
Any Given Sunday: all the longest yards
Any Given Sunday opens tight on the ball, pre-snap, and if it wasn't in widescreen we might think it's really just Sunday afternoon again. But then there's the tribal music pounding in, which, along with all the fancy camerawork, is a giveaway that this is Oliver Stone football. Meaning lots of stylized slow-motion and upbeat sounds, working contrapuntally to lend a little magic to the gridiron. It's the same kind of opening Speilberg uses with Saving Private Ryan, where we're on the beaches of Normandy for the first twenty-five minutes or so, getting lost in the battle, (i.e., acclimatized to WWII) only here the battle is between men wearing regulation pads, coaches chewing high-blood pressure meds like candy. It lasts just as long as Spielberg's Normandy, though, if not longer, and, as that opening game is rendered so well, so indulgently, our critical faculties are dulled the littlest bit, just enough to where we won't necessarily question all that comes after. It's a common trick, (Ludivico Treatment, yes) though only the big-name directors seem to have enough pull with the studios to get away with it. The rest have to do as The Last Boy Scout does, and try to compress it all into one five-minute sequence. Which results in things like Billy Cole using a pistol on the playing field, which, yes, illustrates the kinds of pressure these guys are under quite effectively, but at the cost of other things best not sacrificed.
Once things get started with Any Given Sunday, however--and in spite of all the camerawork--it's all pigskins and dollar signs, (and cameos) or, better yet, the friction between pigskins and dollar signs. As Coach D'Amato (Pacino, still hoarse from The Insider) says, football irrevocably changed the first time a time-out was called for a commercial. As he sees it, TV is killing the game, but then, too, the game he's talking about is the game of his youth, all tinted with Lombardian nostalgia, 'pure,' not at all the same game his third-string 'star' quarterback Willie Beaman (Jamie Foxx) is playing, which caters to the cameras. As any good hero must be, too, he's more or less alone in his thinking: neither do his players seem to agree with him, nor does his boss, hard-driving owner Christina Pagniacci (Cameron Diaz). Yet he's got a season to win. And if that wasn't enough stacked against him, he also seems to be dealing with it in all the generic self-destructive ways (bourbon, Elizabeth Berkley).
And yes, his dilemma is the crux of the movie upon which everything else turns, but to understand it you have to look away from him, not to Jerry Maguire or Love of the Game or any of the other sports-type vehicles, but deeper into Any Given Sunday itself, the minor characters whom Stone uses very effectively, for a change. Specifically, the little dynamic going on between Dr. Mandrake (James Woods) and Dr. Powers (Matthew Modine), a dynamic wherein the younger slowly becomes the older, in spite of his efforts not to. Stone just slips this in as if it's happenstance, filler, but it's anything but: instead of just distracting us for a few moments with good acting (Woods and Modine) or venting the tension of the previous scene or anything like that, the Mandrake/Powers dynamic presents in its barest terms what's fundamentally going on in the rest of Any Given Sunday: the ritual torch-passing. This is Stone, after all; ritual does comes first, last, and in the middle. And not just for Mandrake and Powers, but for Pagniacci and her dead father; for Beaman and aging quarterback Cap Rooney (Everybody's All American Dennis Quaid, still making faces like Doc Holliday); and last, for D'Amato and his idol, the venerable Vince Lombardi. Everybody's slowly (170 min.) turning into someone else, on-screen, and, to Stone's credit, it works, though it might have worked better without the redemptive coda. But so be it. At least Any Given Sunday never falls into the pit of hero worship, never tries to deal head-on with the social issues involved with gladiator sports. And yes, it is a seriously long movie, but it had to be, too. Otherwise all the music wouldn't have fit.
(c)2000 Stephen Graham Jones
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