NFL GM counts on human values to build his team

Rating: 8/10 (14 April 2014)

Forget about the football. This film is about the importance of restoring humanity to the cold machinery of capitalism. It's about how someone with power should deal with people. In the calculation of a company's need, amid all the quantifiable criteria the overriding importance lies in character. Know your people, know their value, know their weakness, and give them the chance to realize themselves. Then it doesn't matter whether you win or lose. You've made life as good as you can for your team.
That's the strength of Sonny Weaver Jr (Kevin Costner, touching and superb as a good man in a brute job). He carries his genius coach father's name so he feels an extra onus, especially since as GM he fired his dad (who has just died). But he's Sonny so even as a son he's upbeat, sunny. The weaver can weave dreams (like those of his NFL draft prospects, his team, the losing Cleveland Browned-off fans) or an entrapping, debilitating web (same list, plus his girlfriend, his own ambitions) or a harmonious creation (as at film's end the Browns seem poised to become).
This sensitivity is all the more important in a traditionally male industry — like politics and, yeah, I suppose to some extent like the NFL. As Sonny's team accountant/lawyer Ali (Jennifer Garner) observes, it's ironic that the top award in this ultra-macho sport is a piece of jewelry. That rings true, especially as Ali is also GM Sonny's main squeeze and is carrying his kid. Against the tradition, this woman is one of the grid-savviest characters in the film. She proposes the special teams Seahawk to complete the penultimate deal. And Sonny fired his dad at his mother's (Ellen Burstyn) request, to save the old guy's life. Women make key decisions here. Sonny's human instincts are definitely from his feminine side. Still, he's a guy in a guy's world (capitalism or its apogee, NFL) so he needs feminine sensitivity but not any indulgent sentimentality. That keeps him reticent when the women want him to talk.
Hence Sonny's maneuvering in the snakey plot. He's tempted to make the deal his macho team owner (Frank Langella) demands but balks when he gets an insight into the prize prospect's character. The guy lies. So he doesn't really command his teammates' respect. As there is less to this star quarterback than meets the eye on the win-loss column, so there's more to the passionate linebacker whom Sonny prefers. The QB racks up the gals but the LB was ejected for giving his TD football to a woman in the stands — his dying sister. Sonny opts for character. He even forgives the good man's indiscreet tweeting, given his fuller sense of the man. He keeps his coach despite his betrayal and opposition. And the GM is man enough to apologize to the intern, lowest on the totem pole.
The team owner is a showboat without the understanding his GM marshalls. He'll never know why Sonny made the decisions he did but he's happy here because he thinks they'll win for him. The bust QB's total commitment to winning disqualifies that value.
This is as good a film as Canadian director Ivan Reitman has made. The script is tense, concise, witty, suspenseful, full of interesting characters with a range of strength/weakness, equally valuable.
Reitman plays an interesting trick here. Phone conversations are often presented in split screens. That's conventional. Reitman's trick is to have a character in one screen lap over into the other. The characters are physically in different spaces, but that overlap reminds us of the essential unity of people across whatever divides them. That twist on the device enforces the central theme of the community and sensitivity that should bind the separate, even conflicting components in any enterprise, especially business, and --especially today -- politics.
I'm looking forward to the sequel. Sonny and Ali have their kid. With both parents so passionately steeped in football, the kid grows up — to espouse cricket. For more see www.yacowar.blogspot.com.