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The fit that many devout Roman Catholics have been having over Stigmata is nothing compared to the collective balk baseball fans could have thrown if the latest of Kevin Costner’s baseball epics came up hitless. (There; since nearly every male scribe harbors some ambition to be a sportswriter, I’ve tried to get all the latent allusions out of the way in the first sentence so they won’t intrude later.) It doesn’t even matter so much whether he treated America’s Game with respect, scorn, or even indifference, as long as he got it right. I mean, Costner was only a catcher in Bull Durham -- face it, Tinky Winky could probably fake his/her way behind the plate with help from clever editing...shucks, they even got a chimpanzee to play third base in Ed -- and in Field of Dreams he wasn’t a player at all, just a fan, albeit a pathologically dedicated one. But in For Love of the Game, he would be playing a veteran pitcher striving to toss a perfect game in what could be his last appearance (the pitcher’s, not Costner’s, .although with his recent boxoffice record, one more mediocre outing and you never know) before retiring.
Throwing fastballs is not something that lends itself to fakery. People, especially the ones putting up the money for this movie, were nervous enough that Costner had ordained to hand the directorial scepter to Sam Raimi, who would soon earn a lot of respect with A Simple Plan, but when the decisions were being made regarding FLOTG was still best known as the whacked-out Evil Dead guy who could hardly get anybody to come see his equally gonzo western The Quick and the Dead even though it starred Sharon Stone, Gene Hackman, and pre-drowned Leonardo DiCaprio. (Plan star Billy Bob Thornton said that, with Raimi’s offbeat reputation, the studio was “afraid that suddenly the whole baseball team will turn into zombies and their eyes will fall out.”) Had Raimi made a half-hearted depiction of the game, resorting to a computer-generated horsehide (oops, sorry, there’s some vernacular that escaped the first sentence) or other trickery common to lesser contemporary baseball movies, audiences would at best laugh, at worst spit tobacco juice all over the screen. Even more disastrous, they’d simply stay home.
But Raimi and star get it right. For Love of the Game is the sort of great big, sentimental, at times even maudlin film that can be excusable when trying to capture so big and sentimental an institution. Costner is Billy Chapel, a paunchy, declining, 40-year-old rightie who's played his entire career for the Detroit Tigers. Now the longtime owner has tired of the business that baseball has become, and is selling out to a group that has voiced intent to trade Chapel. So on a late September afternoon in New York against the Yankees, when both he and his team are apparently past salvaging much dignity in losing seasons, and when his longtime lover Jane (Kelly Preston) has announced that day she’s leaving him to take an editing job in London, he reaches inside and tries to pull out one last shining, heroic moment.
With Vin Scully providing homeric play-by-play, Chapel bears down, zones out, and gives it his best. In the dugout between innings, though, his mind wanders, playing out the high and low points of his five year love affair with Jane, as well as his adoptive relationship with her precocious, intuitive daughter Heather (Jena Malone, who previously did divorced child in Stepmom). The game is into the seventh inning before he suddenly realizes not one Yankee batter has reached base. Meanwhile Jane is stuck in an airport lounge with a delayed flight, unable to escape a crowd of rabid Yankee fans watching the drama unfold on TV, and gets drawn into the histrionics despite herself. As Billy’s aged, injured arm tires hopelessly, and his equally mediocre-seasoned teammates try to rise to the occasion, we get an unabashedly soft-hearted parable for anybody who ever struggled with anything, complete with visions of the ghosts of his deceased parents in the stands, Bob Seger’s “Against the Wind,” and a last-ditch invocation of The Almighty.
Face it, none of us is above being emotionally manipulated now and then. And although Costner, who hadn’t played ball since high school but reportedly proved capable of throwing within a few m.p.h. of the average major leaguer, has since voiced unhappiness with the film’s final cut, he delivers an earthily sincere, believable performance that helps make For Love of the Game the first film I’ve seen in a while where the audience actually clapped at the ending. Of course, it was a showing fairly well-packed with folks who appeared to be at or near retirement age, a generation that helped make baseball the revered institution it once was -- whether it ever will be again or not. B
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