For most movies about sports, the basic plot deals with an underdog who after a series of setbacks comes back to, if not win the big game or match, but at least will win the respect of the fans.
As for writer Aaron Sorkin, it seems his writing tends to deal with fast-talking, clever repartee that emphasizes the characters believe what they are doing is massively important, because they're so darn smart, and everything they do is of an earth-shattering significance. This tendency is why I haven't seen Sorkin's new HBO drama The Newsroom, since it would seem obnoxious there and the ads annoyed, but I didn't mind it too much in The Social Network because, since it was essentially about Facebook, I can write off the paradigm-shift talk Jesse Eisenberg and Justin Timberlake as the usual sort of self-importance some young people possess for no reason, while an over 40 anchorman should, ideally, know better. Maybe I would dig The West Wing since the American President actually does make earth-shattering decisions.
What made 2011's Moneyball so fascinating is that, despite being a sports-based movie, and having Sorkin as a co-writer on the screenplay, neither of the above stereotypes really fit.
To be sure, this is an underdog's story, but the underdog in this case deals with the business side of baseball. There is also a big game where the underdog players triumph. And there is a bit of clever repartee, but coming from the mouth of Brad Pitt and former-Superbad-kid-turned-Academy-Award-Nominee Jonah Hill is quieter, more earnest without being righteous or with the characters too concerned with their own cleverness.
But the thing that actually impressed me with this movie is that, even with the Sorkin pedigree, it is very concerned with, and does a good job dealing with, silences. The above-mentioned big game has patches of no sound which really drives home the tension.
Pitt plays Billy Beane, a one-time player turned general manager for the Oakland A's. After a heartbreaking lose in the playoffs, he sees his two star players poached by bigger market teams and has to rebuild. While visiting Cleveland, he spies Hill and sees Hill seems to have some real influence in the office. Hill, as Yale-educated economist Peter Brand, has a theory on how to best put together a team, using only stats, not star potential or how handsome the player might look on a box of Wheaties. As a result, Beane hires Brand as his new number 2, returns to Oakland, and in defiance of all his scouts, picks up a team of has-beens, nobodies, and never-weres, players who have troubled history, odd playing behavior, or even seemingly career-ending injuries Manager Art Howe (a head-shaved Phillip Seymour Hoffman) initially refuses to play the players Beane and Brand bring in (trying saying that five times fast) until Beane figures the way to force Howe's hand by trading away players Howe refuses to bench.
Surprisingly, Beane and Brand are proven correct. Or perhaps not so surprising, as the movie is based on a true story, and it seems doubtful a movie, or the book it was based on, would be made had the plan been an abysmal failure.
In fact, Beane's program was too successful. After a few years, he gave his secret to author Michael Lewis, who wrote the book this movie was based on, and now many teams with more money than Oakland could ever hope for are winning with Beane's formula, putting the real Beane back where he started. This is a movie, though, about the business of sports, and how a man comes to see numbers as a key to success, and then even comes out of his shell to actually interact with players (Beane makes it a point to never even be in the ballpark during a game due to his own superstitions and won't talk to players he's traded at the start of the movie). Beane both denies and affirms the romanticism of the game, and that makes for an interesting take on the traditional sports film.
Monday, August 27, 2012
Thursday, August 2, 2012
My Own Private Idaho (1991)
As a fan of the works of William Shakespeare, I really get a kick out of seeing the different variations film has done for the works of the Bard of Avon. Maybe one of the strangest I've seen is 1991's My Own Private Idaho.
The plot lifts a bit, including dialogue, from Shakespeare's Henry IV Part I and Part II. Not the whole play, since the story of a prince coming of age and realizing his responsibilities while helping his father fight off various rebellions doesn't really fit completely into a story about teenage prostitutes in modern day Portland. Yes, Shakespeare's plays titled "Henry IV" are more about his son, the future Henry V, but he's a heck of a lot more interesting, given Shakespeare pairs him off with the completely fictional fat knight Falstaff, and then proceeds to eventually cut him off and be England's great warrior king (unlike Richard the Lionhearted, Henry came back to England after winning his big war). To accommodate Shakespeare's play, writer/director Gus Van Sant plops a Prince Hal stand-in in the form of Keanu Reeves' Scott Favor, son of the mayor of Portland, a teenage runaway selling his body for sex, mostly to gay men, but he makes it clear he's not really into the gay stuff if he's not being paid for it. Scott's Falstaff is an overweight homeless man named Bob who leads a gang of thieves, most of whom double for hustlers like Scott and his friend Mike Waters.
Van Sant does some interesting stuff here with the plays. It isn't enough to borrow the plot, but he actually drops Shakespeare's actual lines into the movie here and there, mostly from Bob, with a name change here and there...and it works. It really works. The language is more formal, maybe a bit archaic, but it still conveys a hell of a punch. Given Van Sant doesn't seem interested in making a particularly realistic film, why not have some iambic pentameter? He even gives Shakespeare a writer's by-line in the closing credits.
But the Shakespeare is not the real plot as it turns out. River Phoenix's Mike is the real focus of the film. He's a hustler, but actually gay since he's in love with his wealthy friend Scott, he suffers from narcolepsy and may fall asleep at the drop of a hat, and he really misses the mother who abandoned him as a child. Scott offers to help Mike find his long lost mom, which takes the pair from the mean streets of Portland to a largely deserted road in the middle of Idaho (the same patch Mike begins and ends the film in), and finally to Rome, where Mike's mom went, but didn't stay. There, Scott meets an Italian girl, falls in love, and leaves Scott to his own devices. Here, like with Prince Hal, Scott assumes his responsibilities and rejects his old life, doing so to Bob directly but implying as much for Mike who he never speaks to again in the course of the movie.
Van Sant also does one of the more unusual sex scene techniques I've seen. Rather than show the sex, he has his actors pose still for a series of shots. These aren't still shots as you can see the actors breathing, and it happens twice. The first is a gay threesome between Scott, Mike, and Udo Kier's eccentric German character Hans. The second is between Scott and his new Italian girlfriend Carmella, played by Italian actress Chiara Caselli. The second scene neatly displays the moment when Scott embraces his role as the mayor's son and comes home, Carmella in tow (she silently stays with him for the rest of the movie).
Now, personally, I'm no fan of Keanu Reeves. I think he's largely a wooden actor who does best when he doesn't really talk much, like in The Matrix. Sylvester Stallone displays a similar ability for First Blood until his weepy monologue at the end of the movie. Here, though, given it is an inherently unrealistic movie, with dialogue that at times strives for the high theatrical, it actually works. He isn't as good as Phoenix by a long shot, but he makes this role work somehow.
The plot lifts a bit, including dialogue, from Shakespeare's Henry IV Part I and Part II. Not the whole play, since the story of a prince coming of age and realizing his responsibilities while helping his father fight off various rebellions doesn't really fit completely into a story about teenage prostitutes in modern day Portland. Yes, Shakespeare's plays titled "Henry IV" are more about his son, the future Henry V, but he's a heck of a lot more interesting, given Shakespeare pairs him off with the completely fictional fat knight Falstaff, and then proceeds to eventually cut him off and be England's great warrior king (unlike Richard the Lionhearted, Henry came back to England after winning his big war). To accommodate Shakespeare's play, writer/director Gus Van Sant plops a Prince Hal stand-in in the form of Keanu Reeves' Scott Favor, son of the mayor of Portland, a teenage runaway selling his body for sex, mostly to gay men, but he makes it clear he's not really into the gay stuff if he's not being paid for it. Scott's Falstaff is an overweight homeless man named Bob who leads a gang of thieves, most of whom double for hustlers like Scott and his friend Mike Waters.
Van Sant does some interesting stuff here with the plays. It isn't enough to borrow the plot, but he actually drops Shakespeare's actual lines into the movie here and there, mostly from Bob, with a name change here and there...and it works. It really works. The language is more formal, maybe a bit archaic, but it still conveys a hell of a punch. Given Van Sant doesn't seem interested in making a particularly realistic film, why not have some iambic pentameter? He even gives Shakespeare a writer's by-line in the closing credits.
But the Shakespeare is not the real plot as it turns out. River Phoenix's Mike is the real focus of the film. He's a hustler, but actually gay since he's in love with his wealthy friend Scott, he suffers from narcolepsy and may fall asleep at the drop of a hat, and he really misses the mother who abandoned him as a child. Scott offers to help Mike find his long lost mom, which takes the pair from the mean streets of Portland to a largely deserted road in the middle of Idaho (the same patch Mike begins and ends the film in), and finally to Rome, where Mike's mom went, but didn't stay. There, Scott meets an Italian girl, falls in love, and leaves Scott to his own devices. Here, like with Prince Hal, Scott assumes his responsibilities and rejects his old life, doing so to Bob directly but implying as much for Mike who he never speaks to again in the course of the movie.
Van Sant also does one of the more unusual sex scene techniques I've seen. Rather than show the sex, he has his actors pose still for a series of shots. These aren't still shots as you can see the actors breathing, and it happens twice. The first is a gay threesome between Scott, Mike, and Udo Kier's eccentric German character Hans. The second is between Scott and his new Italian girlfriend Carmella, played by Italian actress Chiara Caselli. The second scene neatly displays the moment when Scott embraces his role as the mayor's son and comes home, Carmella in tow (she silently stays with him for the rest of the movie).
Now, personally, I'm no fan of Keanu Reeves. I think he's largely a wooden actor who does best when he doesn't really talk much, like in The Matrix. Sylvester Stallone displays a similar ability for First Blood until his weepy monologue at the end of the movie. Here, though, given it is an inherently unrealistic movie, with dialogue that at times strives for the high theatrical, it actually works. He isn't as good as Phoenix by a long shot, but he makes this role work somehow.