That Championship Season

I'm writing this hopefully to have these comments take the place of the inane, untrue comments by another viewer whose comments' title is "a failure". This film is full of performances that are a primer for anyone wishing to be an actor; and I watched it expecting it to be play-ish and dry: it was not, it was expertly directed (rare for a playwright to do that so well; Mamet can't even do it), expertly paced, expertly shot and edited. This film richly reflects the excellent play and is a championship effort by all. (I am a produced playwright and screenwriter; most likely the viewer/commentator who deemed this film "a failure" is a failure himself.)

I went back to this after 25 years. I read an article about Robert Mitchum and it reminded me of his performance in That Championship Season, which wasn't even mentioned in the article. I bought it and re discovered 5 excellent acting performances. The best performance? Stacy Keach (James Daley). He is as pathetic as any self-disappointed middle aged man could get in his grandiosity and self pity. My favorite Character is Phil Romano, played by Paul Sorvino. Rich, degenerate, and one election away from financial ruin. In one of the first scenes, when the group shows up at the emergency City Council meeting to discuss a political disappointment, his swagger walking in and walking out of the room was elegant arrogance. The writing is superb, and the backdrop in economically depressed Scranton captured the atmosphere of Rustbelt economic desperation (which nicely parallels the personal and professional desperation of each of the characters) perfectly. Worth seeing.

When the names of producers Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus are mentioned, it seems that the first thought that comes to mind are the schlocky B-grade action movies that they made. While this is understandable (they *did* make a lot of those movies), what has faded from people's minds is that they produced a number of arty, serious-minded dramas as well. That includes "That Championship Season", which is pretty unknown today despite getting some respectable reviews at the time. It's a movie that deserves to be rediscovered. No, it's no classic, but it has a lot going for it, the most obvious thing being its cast. The cast is first-rate, with all five players giving top-notch performances. The characters they play are interesting as well - they are all flawed (including, but not limited to spouting racial slurs), but interesting in their flaws and how they deal with them when exposed. I was interested in how these characters would end up at the film's end. It isn't a perfect movie - it's obvious which parts of the movie were not in the original play, for one thing, and most of the movie is stuck in the ground floor of a house - but it is *good*, and will make you wonder why Golan and Globus' tries for respectability were rejected by audiences.

If ever a play made a wonderful movie, than this is it. The characters were portrayed beautifully by the fine actors in the cast (excluding Robert Mitchum who I think seemed ill-prepared or something....I'm not quite sure why he wasn't right). I loved this movie for it's intense angles on life and it's often colorful, but at times very dark, humor. I thought Jason Miller did a fine job directing. The interaction between the "boys" (as the coach calls them) was at times pathetic and at other times very tender and dear. I come from a family of seven brothers and it kind of reminded me of how love can ebb and flow with so many undercurrents of anguish and hostility. I thought it was also interesting that it was filmed in Scranton (the director's home town). It had that real small town tone to it which was perfect for this movie. Too bad it never really received much attention. I think I read somewhere that when it opened, it was in competition with several other highly successful films. Great entertainment and quite thought provoking.

It took about a decade for Jason Miller's Pulitzer Prize winning play That Championship Season to finally make it to the big screen. But even with Miller himself writing an introductory prologue for the screen it never quite loses its stage origins.

I have to say that Miller tried though, he was clearly influenced by the film adaption of Long Day's Journey Into Night where the Tyrone house almost becomes a character unto itself. But the coach's house in this film does not quite have the same grandeur.

What's reuniting Coach Robert Mitchum and his boys from the 1954 state championship basketball team is the re-election campaign of Bruce Dern one of the members. The other three of the four remaining starting five are brothers Stacy Keach and Martin Sheen and Paul Sorvino who is now one of the richest men in town. Keach is now the principal of the high school where he was a star athlete and his brother Sheen is a ne'er do well drunk.

They've all got their secrets and during the coach's efforts to get his boys working in tandem again a lot of dirty little secrets come out about all of them.

Mitchum was not the original choice for the part of the coach, the role was slated for William Holden who died before shooting could start. According to Lee Server's biography of Mitchum, Bob had real difficulty with the role because he was not particularly a sports fan, of basketball or anything else for that matter. He had a hardscrabble life as a kid and didn't do much or learn much in the way of sports. It was part he could never quite get into, especially using all the sports idioms to make a point. On stage the part was done by Charles Durning. Paul Sorvino was the only member of the original cast to repeat his role.

The original play did not have the whole business about the elephant dying and Dern's attempts to get rid of the body shown on screen. That was Miller's new writing to get more of a movie feel to his project. The film was shot entirely on location in Scranton, Pennsylvania though the bulk of it was in and around the coach's house and that could have been done anywhere.

That Championship Season is not a bad film, but considering the author himself helped with adaption it should have turned out better.