Costner
Film Not Bad
It's No 'Bull Durham' But This Flick Is A Good One
By David Kozo
For
Love of the Game
Starring: Kevin Costner, Kelly Preston
Directed by: Sam Raimi
Universal Studios
137 minutes
Grade: B-
NEW YORK (AQB)--A decade after Kevin Costner’s back-to-back baseball successes in 1988’s Bull Durham and 1989’s Field of Dreams, he dons the cleats one more time in For Love of the Game, in which he plays an aging Tigers pitcher, Billy Chapel, who’s grappling with his past as he tries to pitch a perfect game in what could be his last one.
The story is told in flashback and largely involves his on again-off again romance with New York journalist Jane Aubrey (Kelly Preston), which is on the verge of ending. The movie’s a bit of an anachronism: an unapologetically sentimental, cliched love story in a cynical age of horror flicks and wisecracking crime capers.
When most other movies are trying to resemble the latest Tarantino or Scorsese, this one shoots no higher than An Affair to Remember. And just as Billy and Jane ultimately realize their true devotion, the movie, to its credit, never wavers from its commitment to serve up pitch after pitch of corny sentiment.
A neat early scene is one in which Billy, on the night before the big game, is stood up waiting for Jane to come meet him at his plush hotel room. We haven’t met her yet, and prejudge the situation as just a ballplayer having an out-of-town fling with a groupie. But that early cynicism is stripped away by the subsequent flashback scenes of the relationship’s five-year history. The relationship is indeed involved and is forged by many outside influences, and screenwriter Dana Stevens and director Sam Raimi aren’t afraid to let some heart show through.
In one scene, Jane tells Billy she likes to grip a baseball because she knows he’s somewhere doing the same thing. In another Billy is, yes, standing out in the rain and looking up at Jane’s window while she’s with someone else. It may not seem it, but the filmmakers are taking chances here, daring the audience to snicker at this old-fashioned earnestness.
The story of this romance is spelled out while Billy is laboring on the mound, going deeper into a game than his 40-year-old body is used to. (Among active pitchers his career would seem to resemble that of Orel Hershiser’s, though Billy probably has more career wins.) The scene: It’s the penultimate game of the season and the Tigers are trying to play spoilers to the Yankees, who lead the Red Sox by one game.
The game scenes themselves are overwrought with excessive use of sound and slow motion, and while the film is relatively baseball-savvy, there’s plenty for diehard fans to find unrealistic. Billy is that always rare crafty righthander whose pitches never seem to crack 80. Vin Scully and Steve Lyons, playing themselves as the Fox broadcast team, appear never to mention what the Red Sox did in their game (the scoreboard shows they lost, which means the Yankees clinch a tie), and fans watching on TV don’t seem to care about that either.
Just as Costner’s Crash Davis was the support system for pitcher Nuke Laloosh in Bull Durham, here John C. O’Reilly (Hard Eight, Boogie Nights) plays Billy’s personal catcher and professional sidekick. Then there’s the versatile actor JK Simmons, so compelling as the neo-Nazi on the HBO series Oz and as psychiatrist Emil Skoda on Law & Order, who does a nice turn as the chaw-chomping Tigers manager.
The role is hardly a stretch for Costner, yet it’s an interesting performance to compare with Crash Davis. In that role he was a tired veteran, too, but he could still be playful. Now he’s even older, and with his personal life unraveling he’s just plain beaten down. Preston, in a rich role that’s her biggest to date, pulls it off. Though the flashbacks are told through his eyes, before long we’re siding with her.
A movie
that “only” strives to be a good romance may not deserve overwhelming
praise. But it can still be enjoyable.
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