It May Be Confused, But It Still Has Its Feet On The Ground

Rating: 8/10 (30 September 2007)

Oliver Stone's powerful, unique, and densely wide-scope football film is entertaining, effacing, dramatic, and fun, even for people like myself who are not fans of football. However, cinema's arguable master, and if nothing else the first director that comes to anyone's mind, when it comes to organizing an acute and brutally brave and honest sociopolitical argument begins his descent into tapering genius here. His previous films are models of specified statements. The first half of Any Given Sunday is an extreme closeup commentary concering the corporate manipulation, dangerously extreme masculinization, and pride battles of up-and-coming young stars in the NFL. The second half is a feel-good sports movie. The critical stance is gone, save for the Hollywoodized comeuppance in the denouement, which you'll understand when you see the film or if you've seen it. Stone seems muddle-headed. Is he fickle here? Or else what is it that he's saying? He's most certainly saying something, based on the barefaced, clearcut attitude and communication of the beginning. This isn't U Turn, where Stone decided to make nothing more than a thriller. Any Given Sunday seems to double back upon itself.
However, that may be the intent of the film. Maybe he's showing the dual nature of football, one side being the gross, purely American Frankenstein's monster created out of stitched together parts of negative characteristics of our country like the domineering, boot camp- like machismo with completely unaware yet glaring homosexual overtones, corporate scandal, and the meeting of egotism and fame, and the other side being a game of passion shared by its players and its fans, where coaches and players are willing to struggle for their place. Altogether as a film, though, this is not a message sent with clarity. Subtlety is one thing. Lack of clarity is another. This film suffers from the latter, as I'm not even sure whether this is the intentional message of the film or not.
I may find gaping fault in the film, but as I say at the beginning of this review, I did enjoy it very much. I think the highlight of the entire film is the seven minutes in the locker room before the climactic game where Al Pacino, completely inhabiting his role as a weather- beaten, lonely old coach, gives his team the most inspirational, warm and passion-pumped prep speech I may have ever heard in a sports film, projecting his own unbroadcasted feelings about life into the growing aggression of the monologue where he tells his team that he cannot make them feel one way or another about how they play during the game, but he can tell them flat out that it's a game founded upon fighting and dying for "that inch we all need." The film overall is packed with great performances, especially those of Jamie Foxx, Dennis Quaid, Cameron Diaz, and James Woods.
Stone's football sequences have the intensity of a roller-coaster ride. There is something subtle about his tailoring of those scenes that makes the players, the field, the ball, the stadium, and the sky seem so large and intimidating, and it works, not diminished by the injection of the overall film's gimmicky cinematographic and editing angles. Stone once again employs the fast-cutting, nerve-filing visual style based on the impressions of the nature of the MTV and VH1 generations of television and media coverage. Perhaps that's why I'm able to excuse the film's unclear voice. Perhaps it's because Any Given Sunday is a sports film, but it doesn't masquerade itself like all the others do, as a sky-blue, miracle-reality, gift-wrapped, feel- good movie that artificially pumps up with emotion and cheer with the slow-motion happiness that seems like it'll last forever. Stone's film is not cynical. It just doesn't want to butter you up, and I respect that greatly, and it's infinitely endearing to me personally to see a sports film with its feet on the ground and no superficial moments for delusional audiences.