STONED EXTREMES
When it comes to Oliver Stone movies, they can either run hot or cold but, at least, you are riveted by the images, the sounds, and the persuasive performances. Oliver Stone's newest film, "Any Given Sunday," an epic parable about football, has lots of visual razzle-dazzle to spare, plenty of bone-crushing sound effects, and some temporarily persuasive performances. It is also a complete comedown from the director, a relentlessly torpid mishmash of montages within montages that will make you want to take some Valium to relieve the massive headache you will get.
Al Pacino stars as Tony D'Amato, a veteran football coach of the fictional Miami Sharks, who drinks too much, hollers too much, screws around with prostitutes, and is getting too old for the game. A spoiled, bratty rich girl, Christina Pagniacci (Cameron Diaz), the late team owner's daughter, starts telling Tony to "hold it together, you bull-headed moron!" She wants control of the game, but in more economic terms. Tony also has a young star quarterback, Willie Beaman (Jamie Foxx), who is egoistic, has no team spirit, and is certain that the game is his. He replaces the older, injured Jack "Cap" Rooney (Dennis Quaid), who faces a wife (Lauren Holly) that demands he continue playing the game for another couple of years.
In fact, there are many characters in "Any Given Sunday," but so few are given more than a few minutes onscreen at a time. The cast is eclectic (James Woods, Ann-Margret, Matthew Modine, Jim Brown, Elizabeth Berkley) but there are only traces of them. That leaves us with Pacino, an excellent actor, who is given shards of a character to play, but without any depth or dimension. Cameron Diaz does as well as she can, but like everyone else, she sort of drifts in and out of the frame barely making an impression. This is akin to watching football on television, the cast resembles nothing more than stick figures in Stone's arena.
The biggest problem lies with the editing. Stone has assembled footage in extraordinary shifts of mood and excitement in films such as "J.F.K," "Natural Born Killers," and "U-Turn," but here, it is the shift of one close-up shot after another in rapid succession. This often feels like super MTV, shots and whole sequences are so choppily edited that they leave a feeling of gradual disorientation. The worst of it is during the actual football games. Instead of showing us the mechanics and strategies of playing between the offense and defense, we get close-ups of bodies flying through the air, lots of physical poundings and flips, and twisting footballs, but no sense that any of this is being played on the field. In other words, we never get a panoramic sense of the field itself, and so everything is a blur, leaving us wondering as to what exactly is happening on screen. To top it off, there are numerous montages within montages, clouds speeding through the horizon, and the usual moonlight shots, which Stone has shown us before. All this is draining to watch, and one loses interest quickly.
It is also hard to judge the actors in the film since they are cut-and-pasted in such randomness that Stone barely lets a take run longer than three seconds. A theme is hidden somewhere in this mess about how football players have no education and have nothing else to offer besides great games and reaping in lots of profits. But all is lost in Stone's grandiose style that, for the first time in his career, has no true rhyme or reason (celebrityism and lifestyles of the players, not to mention physical abuses of their bodies, are given minimal exposure). The overall effect is blurry, and casts a pale shadow of the once great Oliver Stone.
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