For Love of the Game (1999)
A Film Review by Mark O'Hara
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Sam Raimi's baseball romance "For Love of the Game" is a likable movie with likable stars, though I'm sure it's not the film event Universal Pictures is hoping it will be.
I wonder, what scenes were cut out, what expletives excised, which angered Kevin Costner to the extent that he is skipping the talk shows? I'm curious, is all, as I am almost sure that the movie would need more than a little doctoring to raise it from its current B-picture status into the A range.
Costner here plays Billy Chapel, 19-year veteran of the Detroit Tigers, a 40 year-old pitcher who's surely headed for the Hall of Fame. Over the opening credits we watch Billy playing baseball in home movies shot in his childhood, many featuring his tall father teaching him the game. (Sound familiar? Think "The Natural.") We know Billy loves the game, but he seems to be having problems with the other love of his life, Jane Aubrey (Kelly Preston), a fashion writer based in New York City. On the day of the last game of the season, Billy wakes up with a hangover, only to have to chase Jane to Central Park and discover she is London-bound to accept a long-awaited editorial position. So all throughout the last game of the Tigers' mediocre season - and perhaps the final game of Billy's career - he broods on his failed relationship with Jane. Will he be able to climb out of his late-career doldrums? Will he and Jane finally alter their long-distance, oft-interrupted affair?
The format of the game as framing device just does not work. The pace of the extended flashbacks is just too slow, and the segments of baseball are just too predictable. In a way the film sags because of another clichéd conceit - baseball as life. It's appropriate that this crucial game is broken up by segments showing the various facets of the relationship between Billy and Jane; but so many long breaks punctuating shorter baseball stints become tiresome.
What the film does nicely is portray a positive role model in Billy Chapel. Everything this guy does is exemplary, except some nasty treatment he throws Jane when his pitching hand is severely injured. Sensitive, handsome: the perfect catch is what Billy amounts to. This somewhat trite characterization is actually pleasing to watch, considering the rotten apples spoiling so many contemporary stories. And Costner is good in the role. Well into his forties, he seems in good shape, and the unshakable subtlety he lends to the role saves many of the scenes from the flatness caused by the script.
As Jane, Kelly Preston delivers a nice enough performance, except that she too suffers from Dana Stevens' screenplay. It's too long for one - the movie weighs in at two hours and seventeen minutes. Further, many of the scenes build a fine tone of characterization, only to fall into flatness because of the ill-fated attempt to avoid cliché. What happens is the hackneyed plot points are merely postponed, and events we think will happen end up taking a longer time to happen. Jane, for instance, shows ambivalence after sleeping with Billy on the first date. This ambivalence grows until we doubt the two will ever reconcile. This delay may indeed result in dramatic tension, but we are simply teased too many times to care by the time the climax final nears.
John C. Reilly is good as the confidant - Billy Chapel's craggy-faced catcher. He has a relationship with Billy similar to that between Steve Carlton, the Phillies ace, and his favorite ball-stopper, Tim McCarver, whose career spanned four decades. Reilly's friendly Gus Osinski saves many scenes, and the guy plays a believable and sentimental drunk. He could have conditioned more the role, though.
Another strong supporting role is turned in by Jena Malone as Jane's daughter Heather. Jane is a single mom, and worries constantly about guys being turned off by the idea of a ready-made child (another familiar situation in films!). Malone does a remarkable job in portraying Heather as (roughly) a 13 year-old, and then as a college student at USC. What a gap!
The movie does take a few risks that make it better than average. There's a neat motif, a sort of reverse deep focus when Billy blocks out the stadium noise, his "mechanism" cutting in and the crowd around him blurring into silence: this is a sort of cinematic synethesia.
Not as good as the aforementioned "The Natural" or Costner's triumph, "Bull Durham," "For Love of the Game" takes its time for a relationship to be developed and thwarted many times over. The result is a pleasant but rather weightless film. What Costner should do is stop hitting with a fungo bat, and step up to the serious plate of an art film, an independent venture that would put his integrity and his career back on track
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