Les héros du dimanche

When Oliver Stone isn't flaunting wild conspiracy theories, he actually gets down to the business of making some really good films. And Any Given Sunday is definitely one of those.

It's a difficult perspective for me to write about this movie as my favorite spectator sport is baseball rather than football. But the business end of it is virtually the same. Curiously enough I was in Miami last week and saw the Florida Marlins home opener. They are going through some of the same dealings with the Miami city fathers about a new stadium that you see Cameron Diaz having with Clifton Davis in this film. There's a possibility that Miami will not have its major league baseball franchise soon.

Cameron Diaz is the young owner of the Miami Sharks professional football team who inherited it from her late father who is described as one of the prominent owners in the sport, a kind of combination of Wellington Mara and George Halas. Her father gave Coach Al Pacino complete latitude to deal with his players, but Cameron is taking George Steinbrenner as her role model.

Al Pacino joins the ranks of players who have done outstanding portrayals of athletic coaches. It's an honorable tradition going back to Pat O'Brien as Knute Rockne. I'm not sure how Rockne would have done in the era of seven figure salaries, but Pacino is adapting the best way he can.

When I was a kid in NYC in the fifties following our three major league baseball teams, one of the great constants was Casey Stengel winning that American League pennant for the New York Yankees with Yogi Berra behind the plate. The catcher's job is similar to the quarterback's in football in that he sees the whole game and actually sets the pace in calling the pitches. As Yogi's skills deteriorated over time, Casey could never quite pull the plug on him as the regular catcher. As a result, Elston Howard who would have been a regular on any other team never amassed the statistics that probably would have put him in the Hall of Fame.

Pacino has that kind of dilemma here. A veteran quarterback in Dennis Quaid and an up and coming talent in Jamie Fox. Quaid's skills are deteriorating, but he has the heart of a warrior which Pacino tells him in my favorite moment in the film. And the lesson Fox learns from Pacino and Quaid is that if the team doesn't respect you, you don't lead winners. And winning is the bottom line.

There are a whole lot of good performances here in minor roles, the hallmark of a great film. James Woods as the slimy team doctor, Ann-Margret as Cameron Diaz's mother, LL Cool J as a defensive lineman who may have taken one hit too many. And what a casting coup Oliver Stone pulled off in getting Charlton Heston for a small role as the football commissioner. Who better to run professional football than the guy who brought the Ten Commandments down from Mount Sinai.

I think even non-sports fans can appreciate this film.

I don't intend to add to the many positive comments about this movie. I agree with them. But from another perspective:

First, I have never been a football fan. However, any movie that combines Oliver Stone and Al Pacino has to get my interests. I loved it.

One thing that did impress me more than anything else was the quality of the sound design. The 3 dimensional noises in the huddle, on the line, from the grandstands; the growls and other sounds from the players; these things made the movie live and my blood boil. I was breathless.

Then these things interspersed with dead silences and slow motion dreamlike sequences gave the action a spiritual quality.

I stayed for the credits to see who had done this sound work and I think Wylie Stateman will get, at the very least, an Oscar nomination for sound design. If you ever wondered what this credit meant, see this movie and you will know. This movie would have lost a great deal of its punch without that sound designer's talent.

I thought what a great combo for "Any Given Sunday" - Oliver Stone and professional football -- excess meets its match.

So I grabbed a chance to go to the movies with my sons. They got a lot more out of the first and third thirds of the movie that are football games, which I couldn't follow at all, knowing zilch about football so I missed any references to significances of plays and strategies and didn't recognize the zillion football players past and present in bit parts, but I got other visual and music references they didn't.

The football field is explicitly a jungle, with the sounds like an elephant herd crashing. Of course Stone never says or shows once what he can get across 5 times, so the jungle fever point of the primalness of sports as a venue for male violence is accompanied by Native American chants, aboriginal and Asian Indian mystic strains as well. I don't know enough about rap to judge those selections -- I could tell there were lots of lyrics about "niggaz" working for The Man type of thing.

The second third should have appealed to me as that's when the huge ensemble has personal interactions and we learn all their selfish, dastardly, unpleasant motivations, but I was on sensory overload. Example: Al Pacino as the Old Guard Coach calls in Jamie Foxx as the suddenly first string quarterback (in a terrific performance), for a tête a tête on the pro's of Jazz over Rap, as a metaphor of the old football of finesse (what? all those flashbacks to black & white football games were of a subtle sport?). But when Foxx walks in Pacino has "Ben Hur" playing on a wide-screen TV. As if we didn't get the point Foxx actually says "The old gladiators, huh?" If we still didn't get the point the conversation keeps intercutting with the chariot race. And if we still didn't get the point of any reference in the conversation to racial issues then intercuts to the galley slave scenes from "Ben Hur" THEN on top of that, the NFL commissioner who puts the Bitch Owner in her place for trying to play with the Big Old Guys is none other than Charlton Heston.

No one just has a conversation -- everyone shouts, usually at the same time, so I had to close my eyes and I'm not sure if I missed something.

This is Sunbelt Football of expansion teams where the sport is not a Fall/Winter season - so the women were everywhere in tank tops, cleavage, midriffs bare and hips swinging, even Cameron Diaz as the Bitch Owner. Though all the women are really high priced prostitutes (even usually sweet Lauren Holly is a hardened cold Football Wife).

What I don't think I missed was Stone's outsize determination to ignore the homo-erotic aspects of male sports violence that "Fight Club" reveled in. Aw come on Stone, not a single gay player in the closet? He crowds the behemoths into locker rooms and showers that can barely contain their bodies--but he's so afraid of showing them in contact that he even at one point has one throw a baby alligator into the shower so they scatter.

Everyone is criticized-- including the sportscasters, which Stone revels in playing one (I think in general this movie is a show down between Stone and Spike Lee as it takes on more racial issues than he's done in the past). What a coincidence that ESPN is continually bad-mouthed when there's a big legible credit at the end to Turner Sports Network when this is a Time Warner movie and ESPN's a competitor.

Stone of course goes out of his way to link football with war, to fit into his oeuvre, with battle quotes from Vince Lombardi and some sort of link with Pacino's father dying in WWII that was irrelevant it seemed to me.

I think this is Dennis Quaid's at least third football movie and in the genre of such movies as "North Dallas 40," "Longest Yard," "Great American Hero," etc. and this joins that pantheon as a terrific football movie.

The music selections were by Robbie Robertson (with Paul Kelly but I'm not sure which Kelly that is) and he did as seamless a job as he's done for Martin Scorcese. The music credits at the end were impossible to read -- in 3 columns of a vertical font that was like watching the credits on TV - plus the movie continues under the credits so all those who bolted missed the ending.

Professional football deserves to be Oliver Stoned. But if I never saw any more football that'll be fine with me.

(originally written 12/27/1999)

I think the movie as a whole was excellent. Oliver Stone did a great job, I felt as though I was inside the screen. The almost 3 hours didn't even feel like it, it felt like watching a Football game on Any Given Sunday. Jamie Foxx did a great job, you loved him at times and hated him at times, and he gave you great reason to do either. And of course Al Pacino was the man as always, playing a coach with heart and blowing you away at the end. Cameron Diaz was the best wicked witch, just a hard-core display of a woman of the millenium. All in all, anyone who thinks this movie had no plot, wasn't paying attention. All you have to do is see the change in the characters throughout the movie, and what the game meant to each one of them: from the owner, to the coach, to the players, to the doctors, to the families. Perfect example is the characters of both Ann Margaret and Lauren Holly. There is a lot of meaning in this movie. Kudos!

Sports movies are tough to make. Creating the essence of the actual event is the toughest. Most films fall short in the editing process of the event or through sheer carelessness and lack of knowledge. ANY GIVEN SUNDAY is somewhat of an exception. It is hard-hitting and bloody like NORTH DALLAS FORTY. It is actually conventional when you think about it, like a warped RUDY. It is a hell of a lot more realistic than say, NECESSARY ROUGHNESS. These are all football films with varying degrees of success (except ROUGHNESS), but Oliver Stone, in his usual over the top way, throws a dizzying, mind-splitting film at us, much like the sport itself. This is why I liked it.

Oliver Stone began a wicked spell of filmmaking with JFK, evident in its editing style. Fast-paced, black and white mixed with color, documentary-like methods ensued in NATURAL BORN KILLERS, NIXON, and the ghastly U-TURN. Nothing is new here with ANY GIVEN SUNDAY. Football is a battlefield Stone chooses to depict and depict it he does. Even the most ardent fans of the sport do not really know what it is like for a quarterback to drop back and get rid of a piece of pigskin before 11 players maul him. You certainly get the idea watching this.

Al Pacino is the dried up head coach of the fictional Miami Sharks and he barks out the usual coaching cliches you hear in press conferences after real games. Pacino also seems to be sleep-walking through the picture. At times, he appears drunk even when he is not supposed to be. Cameron Diaz's character, a young chick owner, (yeah right) destroys any credibility the film may have had going in (Even the NFL would have nothing to do with this movie). Her constant bickering is so over-done, you almost feel like hurling much the way Jamie Foxx does every time he enters a game as the team's 3rd string quarterback. Realisticly speaking, this is not a very sane film about football. It is a maniacal celebration of the game. The scenes on the field are the ones I cherished. Beware of the locker room or domestic sequences.

No one has ever put such energy into football scenes in a film before. He definitely had some good consultants. There are some comical cameos - Johnny Unitas and Dick Butkus play opposing coaches. Lawrence Taylor can actually act a teeny bit and Jim Brown shares the film's best off the field scene with Pacino in a bar. Stone tries to show us how the game has changed. He resonates past glory with quotes from Lombardi, dissolves showing Red "the Galloping Ghost" Grange, and even Unitas handing off to Ameche. TV has changed everything, says the coach, and he is right. It seems to be all about the money nowadays.

That is the message, but you'll find yourself losing that idea in the lunacy of ANY GIVEN SUNDAY and the bone-crushing, ear-damaging football scenes. They are filmed and cut with such raw intensity, you feel like playing afterwards. This is definitely a film for football fans only unless you like big, sweaty men. Is there a big game at the end that needs to be won? Yes, and this surprised me considering how unconventional Stone usually is. Basically, surrender your senses and thought process to Stone's most entertaining film in quite some time.

RATING: ***