Summer Homestand: For Love of the Game
Every Wednesday between now and the end of baseball season the Cru Jones Society brings you a new baseball movie examined for both overall entertainment value and treatment of our favorite game. To suggest a film, email us at staff [at] crujonessociety.com. Otherwise, pour yourself an $8 beer, crack some shells, and let’s play ball.
Date Released: September 17, 1999
Box Office Total: $35,188,640
Team Featured: Detroit Tigers
“You’re perfect. You, and the ball, and the diamond, you’re this perfectly beautiful thing. You can win or lose the game, all by yourself. You don’t need me.” – Jane Aubrey (describing Billy)
She’s absolutely right. Billy doesn’t need her, and had she been absent, we might have gotten a semi-entertaining movie about a pitcher’s perfect game than the insufferable 2 hours and 15 minutes we got chronicling two wholly unpleasant people trying hopelessly to find love with each other. If that intro doesn’t get you excited about my thoughts on this movie, nothing will.
Plot Synopsis
For Love of the Game begins on the plane to New York where we find aging Tigers pitcher Billy Chapel (Kevin Costner) grimacing while putting his bag in the overhead bin. Could his elbow be in trouble? Does a Pope shit in the woods? His catcher, played by John C. Reilly sure thinks so and urges him to skip his next start since the Tigers (as usual) aren’t going anywhere this season and are just playing out the string. But you see, Billy has integrity and a love of the game, so he wants to give it his all in every start and possibly play spoiler for the Yanks who have an opportunity to clinch the division that night.
We arrive in New York where Billy waits in his hotel room for on-again, off-again girlfriend Jane, but ends up drunk and alone sleeping on top of his covers in his clothes. The team owner shows up and alerts Billy that he’s sold the team and the new owners want to trade Billy to the Giants at season’s end. Billy’s been a Tiger his whole career and weighs the option of pitching for another team for the first time in his professional career against retirement. Then Jane shows up (about 12 hours late), Billy finds her in Central Park, and she tells him she’s been offered an editor job in London. He urges her not to go, but if I knew then what I knew at the end of this movie, I would have told him to pay for her cab fare and get her the fuck out of his life. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Billy finally gets to Yankee Stadium an hour late, suits up and starts the game strong. He retires the first three batters in order, the highlight of which is his strikeout against Yankees superstar Sam Tuttle (more on that below).
Skip to five years earlier as Billy apparently has better things to think about than the game at hand and we find him cruising on a New York highway where he finds Jane (Kelly Preston) broken down on the side of the road in a nauseating meet cute. He magically fixes her car and invites her to that night’s game. Despite Jane’s bookish pretentiousness and acid unlikability, they bump uglies in the elevator anyway and make a pact to hook back up when Billy returns in a month. He does, and once again Jane gives him a bunch of nonsensical chatter and contrarian bullshit about why they can’t be together.
As Billy continues to mow down the Yankees, his thoughts turn increasingly to Jane as we chronicle their entire relationship via flashback. Jane displays absolutely no likable traits whatsoever, and Billy’s self-involvement and obsession with baseball prevent him from ever committing fully to Jane, which as we all know in a romantic movie, is an unforgivable sin in the eyes of a female character. For instance, when in a snow-covered cabin somewhere, Billy idiotically cuts his pitching hand on a table saw and has to be airlifted to a better hospital than Moose Testicles General (or wherever the fuck they are) to get it fixed. While getting loaded into the helicopter he instructs Jane to get a hold of Tigers trainer Mike Udall because “he is the most important person to me right now.” Jane’s little heart breaks into a thousand pieces, which sets the stage for more awkward romance and stilted relationship finagling between the only two leads in movie history with less chemistry than Hayden Christensen and Natalie Portman in the Star Wars prequels.
We flash back and forth between Billy’s developing perfect game and his relationship with Jane until Billy finally (in the 8th inning, no less) realizes he’s got a perfect game going. He endures debilitating shoulder pain, interminable flashbacks to his miserable relationship with Jane, and a home run scare from a former friend (reminiscent of the great catch in the 9th inning of Mark Buerhle’s recent perfect game) and presses on into the 9th inning trying to wrap things up. Does he make it? Will he get his perfect game? Will he retire at the end of the season? Does John C. Reilly inexplicably get incoherently drunk after the game? Can Billy and Jane salvage their broken, pointless relationship?
The answers: Yes, yes, yes (via signed baseball to the outgoing owner), yes, and this is a romantic drama – what do you think?
Treatment of Baseball/Quality of Baseball Scenes:
For as few scenes as we get, the baseball in this movie is generally quite good. Chapel’s 1st showdown with Tuttle in particular is a lot of fun, and my favorite scene in the movie. Chapel quietly extols all the reasons he hates Tuttle and Tuttle bitches about every strike call against him. (Quick aside: This movie took place before A-Rod was a Yankee, but how perfect is it that Tuttle wears number 13 like A-Rod does now? Same smug expression, same incessant bitching about calls, same jagoff number. Excellent.) As Tuttle moves up and stands right on top of the plate, Chapel’s catcher Gus puts down the sign and it’s a middle finger, so Chapel throws one at Tuttle’s head before striking him out with a fastball away. Love the sequence. Great baseball.
One thing that bothered me was that Billy’s wind-up is terrible. For a fireballing starting pitcher, his leg kick is way too low. If he were a major league pitcher, with a leg kick and wind up like that, he’d probably be Jamie Moyer with a fastball topping out at about 79 mph.
And another thing, Tuttle tries to break up the perfect game in the 7th with a bunt just to be an asshole. From a character standpoint, that’s awesome. From a baseball standpoint, that’s ridiculous. According to Tuttle’s stat graphic, he’s hitting .300 with 39 HR and 98 RBI. You’re as likely to see that motherfucker bunt as you are to see Manny Ramirez grow a bat out of his ass and bunt with his rectum. Give me a fucking break. I realize we’re supposed to hate Tuttle, but having him drop down a bunt just for the sake of being a cocksucker to break up Chapel’s perfect game is patently absurd. Anyone with power numbers like that isn’t bunting. Ever.
But overall, the game looks like major league quality and is treated with appropriate respect.
Annoying Romantic B-Story/Stifling Spouse?
Sweet Jesus, where to start? Right from the get go, Kelly Preston plays one of the most wildly unlikable characters in the history of cinema. If you were to start up a Sports Movie Wildly Unlikable Bitch Hall of Fame, Kelly Preston’s Jane would have to be an inaugural member along with Adrian Balboa pre-coma in Rocky II. I’ll grant you that Billy Chapel is just as culpable in the failings of their relationship, but he’s the only one who makes an honest effort at keeping them together. Jane seems to be there entirely to pour a bucket of water on the proceedings and make frowny faces. At one point, she even does that stupid girl thing where she asks him “If I were burned in a fire, would you still love me?” I saw a stand-up comedian have the best response to that, which is, “Of course. I’d be fucking someone else, but you I would always love.”
Because that question is bullshit. No one knows how to respond to that, and until you’re put in that situation, you shouldn’t even have to think about it. Fuck that question. And fuck her for asking it.
The worst moment in the relationship comes at the very end. Urging her not to get on the plane and go to London, Billy pleads with Jane to give him another shot. After some truly atrocious dialogue, they have this unfathomable exchange:
Billy: I love you, Jane.
Jane: I never believed.
Billy: Believe it.
Really? Not “I love you too”? Not, “I never believed, but I always hoped”? Just “I never believed”? That’s a shitty thing to say. But I suppose that’s to be expected at this point considering Jane hasn’t exhibited any quality worthy of praise as of yet, why should she start now?
Final Thoughts
This is such a miscalculated pile of crap, and WAY too long too clocking in at a ghastly 2 hours and 17 minutes, I felt emotionally dead inside after watching it. They could have shaved 45 minutes off this shit shingle and had, if not a good movie, at least a watchable one. But even with a more managable running time, we still would have had to deal with writing that descends into brutal hackery after every turn. Take Billy struggling with his pitching hand after sawing into it at the cabin and Jane’s attempts to cheer him up:
Jane: Billy, you taught me something. You taught me how to believe in myself and how good things can happen and how they will happen. But now let me teach you something I know. About how life sometimes life seems like it’s slamming you down, but it’s really giving you a gift. I had a baby when I was 16. That could have wrecked me. But it didn’t. Instead, it was the best thing that ever happened to me.
Billy: You mean, if life gives you lemons, make lemonade?
Jane: You’re such an asshole.
Written on the page out of context, that dialogue looks hilarious and if played for laughs, is reminiscent of the exchange Dante and Caitlin have in the video store in Clerks. But when delivered with the stone-faced solemnity of these characters, it plays like bad community theater. And that’s essentially what this story amounts to. We’ve got two profoundly self-absorbed characters trying to find love with each other even though each of them has the emotional age of a high school sophomore. In addition, this is all played under the specter of baseball which, by way of constructing an unforgivably hackneyed love story in the middle of baseball’s most sacred pursuit, plunges this movie to depths of awful I never even knew existed.
I didn’t think it possible to care less about a love story than watching Tom Berenger pursue Rene Russo in Major League, but somehow this movie not only made me not care, but made me actively root against these two jerks from ever ending up together.
Ruling from the Scorer: Batter not only grounds into a double play, but somehow catches fire and burns a group of orphans in the front row.
02 Sep 2009 E Dagger