Play it to the Bone: going the distance
We all love the end of Rocky III, where Rocky and Apollo face each other on the canvas not as friends, but as fighters. It's both violent and tender somehow, knowing that they're tight enough to want to pull their punches yet competitive enough not to even consider it. Sports-obsessed Ron Shelton's Play it to the Bone is made of similar stuff, though, instead of heavyweight class, best friends Vince (Woody Harrelson) and Cesar (Antonio Banderas) are welterweight, and their fight isn't for the belt. In fact, they're not even contenders of any kind, but are the undercard for a pay-per-view Tyson event--the 'appetizer,' if you will--and they're not even the originally-scheduled fighters in the first place, but last-minute replacements, all of which serves to establish that, in spite of what Vince and Cesar may think, this fight won't be about money or titles or any of that.
For a while it seems like they're even tight enough that they won't be able to get glove-to-face when it comes down to it, or that one might take a respectful dive, but then that's what the road trip from L.A. to Las Vegas is for: to get them psyched against each other, do enough verbal sparring that they're ready to come to blows/hugs at a moment's notice. It's one of those long long second acts comprised largely of exposition--what brushes with glory Vince and Cesar are still haunted by, a little character exploration, delving into what motivates them, etc--and it likely would have driven us sleepy-eyed from the theatre if A) we weren't in U-Turn-ish country (or, for Woody, Sunchaser country) in an envy-green 442 with Grace (Lolita Davidovich), who, as it turns out, is romantically attached to both guys, and B) Vince and Cesar didn't have such a muttering great dynamic going on. As the trailer lets on, Woody Harrelson and Antonio Banderas play wonderfully off each other, get themselves into comic discussion after comic discussion. Granted, none of that really matters in the end, but all the same, it's entertaining enough at the moment that you don't really care. It's enough just to see this homophobic holy roller locked in a car with an insecure foreigner, enough to watch how one's commercialized visions of Jesus interact with the other's elaborate prefight rituals.
At the end of the day, though, they do have to fight on pay-per-view, for a long list of cameos (James Woods, Kevin Costner, Rod Stewart, all the right announcers, etc), or, really, for another shot at all the glory they've been unfairly denied, 'unfair' being the key word there, as it establishes both these over-the-hill fighters as underdogs. Combine that with the fact that we always like the underdog to win, then, and Play it to the Bone's introduced a little difficulty, a little of that necessary narrative tension: how to work it such that both guys can win. The usual route is to have one win the match, the other win the girl, but in this case the girl, Grace, refuses to pick sides, chooses instead to root for both guys, to, yes, root not for the people fighting but for the fight itself. And, as their fight goes round after bloody round, Vince and Cesar both hamburger-faced as Deniro ever got in Raging Bull, this rooting not for the fighters but for the fight spreads through the celebrity audience, and for a while boxing is 'pure' again, which is what every boxing movie goes for (every sports movie, really).
This is Vegas, however, and, as we all know, Vegas chews people up and spits them out in the desert. During Vince and Cesar's fight, at least, none of this matters, which is a coup for Play it to the Bone. Where it doesn't quite succeed, however, is when the rapid-fire dialogue stops long enough for you to realize that the only real 'jeopardy' these two fighters are ever in is so amorphous (missing out on that well-deserved glory yet again) that it doesn't really function in the drama; if they do miss out on the glory, they'll just go back to how they were when the movie opened. And, if their camaraderie was any indication, they weren't doing all that bad. Add to that the fact that you don't need to be even mildly psychic to intuit the end, and the little things start to loom large: how awkward it is trying to work the title into a conversation; how much the flashbacks seem to be stock footage from any boxing movie; how patently evil everyone but Vince, Cesar, and Grace are, that kind of stuff. However, Play it to the Bone just about has enough starpower to overcome all that, and, for all those who disliked the bittersweet end of that 'other' buddy/road movie Thelma & Louise, Play it to the Bone, instead of leaving the characters midair, ends with so little preparation that the audience is left midair. Not that all the narrative threads aren't neatly dealt with--they are, and satisfactorily--it's just that the end, reaffirming as it is, perhaps doesn't mete out the 'right' amount of justice for an American audience. To say it another way, everyone seems quite content to have been chewed up and spit out by Vegas. Granted, all that mastication did bond them together a little tighter, but still, the optimism feels just a touch forced.
(c) 2000 Stephen Graham Jones, http://www.cinemuck.com
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