Director Report Card: Sam Raimi (1999)

8. For Love of the Game

When I first started putting together the Director Report Card project, well over a decade ago, I went over the lists of films made by the various filmmakers I hoped to cover. A few times while doing this, I had surprising moments when I saw some middling, forgotten footnote of a motion picture happened to be made by a director I respect. Up there with the revelation that Wes Craven directed “Music of the Heart” or David Cronenberg made a generic race car movie, was me discovering Sam Raimi directed “For Love of the Game.” (The title is not “For the Love of the Game,” because that would've made this baffling enterprise make more sense.) The guy behind the “Evil Dead” trilogy made that?

Honestly, speculating about what possibly could have attracted Sam Raimi to this project is far more interesting than actually watching “For Love of the Game.” Though it has never come up in any of his other films or television series, I suppose it's certainly possible the guy just really likes baseball. Lots of otherwise cool people love that terrible, tedious sport. Another possibility strikes me as more likely, however. “For Love of the Game” was always Kevin Costner's project, as he pushed it through development. The previous two baseball movies Costner starred in, “Field of Dreams” and “Bull Durham,” both received Oscar nominations. Raimi was handpicked by Costner to make “For Love of the Game.” My totally unfounded suspicious is that, after getting a taste of Oscar love with “A Simple Plan,” Raimi decided to really chase the gold by making a glossy inspirational sports movie with the leading man most associated with the genre at the time.

If this was indeed the plan, it backfired horribly. “For Love of the Game” was a commercial flop, grossing only 46 million against his 80 million dollar budget. The reviews were not much better, as most critics derided the film as sappy, self-serious, and painfully slow. The Academy, naturally, did not even glance in the movie's direction. Following walking punchlines “Waterworld” and “The Postman,” the film's dismal performance was another sign that the weird era in history where Kevin Costner was a huge box office star was over. (A factoid some people were all too eager to embrace.) That Raimi's career survived at all is frankly a miracle.

So, aside from America's supposed pastime, what the hell is “For Love of the Game” even about? I'll give the movie this much. It does have a sort of interesting narrative structure. Billy Chapel is a 40 year old pitcher for the Detroit Tigers. He's about to play the last game of the season, against the New York Yankees. Billy is disillusioned with the team owner's decision to sell and hindered by an old arm injury. His longtime girlfriend, Jane, is about to leave him. It seems baseball is all he has left. Once he gets on the pitcher's mound, Chapel starts to throw a no-hitter. But he hardly notices, as he's lost in thought. The film is largely composed of his memories of past events while he plays through the perfect game. See, that's kind of interesting.

One of the reasons I fucking hate baseball, and a big reason it's impossible for me to take most baseball movies seriously, is how utterly self-absorbed the sport is with its own mythical importance. Self-aggrandizing in football and basketball – also largely terrible sports – at least usually focus on the achievements of the players and the couches. Baseball is so high on its own fart, on its status as America's pastime, America's game. “For Love of the Game” is awash in this obnoxiously egotistical belief. At one point, Jane screams to a hospital room about how shameful they are treating the legacy of this great game. (The film is so enamored of her line here that it later repeats it.) As the title indicates, Billy is driven by his fetishistic love of the sport, abandoning those he cares about and harming himself to keep playing it. Give me a fucking break.

“For Love of the Game” thinks baseball is so momentously important, that absolutely everything that happens in the movie revolves around the lead character's profession. Jane can not go anywhere in the country without running into someone watching Chapel's no-hitter. His amazing ball-throwing ability seems to bring the entire country to its knees, as every television or radio in the film is showing the game. The spectators in the stadium personally call out to Chapel by name, because everyone in this movie is that invested in his career. The worst part is how the game's announcers – apparently actual baseball commentators – go on and on about how this amazing feat is going to secure Billy Chapel's legacy. Once again I say: Give me a fucking break.

Yet "For Love of the Game" is not just about a man's passionate love affair with his ability to toss a ball. It wants to be a traditional love story between Billy and Jane too. Considering how mushy the film's treatment of its main sport is, it should come as no surprise that the romantic subplot is 100% pure sap. The two have a meet-cute when he rescues her from the side of the road, fixing her broken down car by magically tapping her engine. From there, they soon fall into each other's arms, leading to several weird and long scenes of Jane professing that she's not the kind of woman who normally does that. (Which reveals a strange gender bias in the film, as Billy happily sleeps around with his masseuse.) Most of the actual growth the two experience in their love life happens over the course of a vaguely Raimi-esque montage, Jane asking him a series of not-so-probing questions. Despite the two supposedly having this deep bond, which only fucking baseball can tear asunder, you never get a sense of them being close. Their relationship exists totally as a plot contrivance. When Chapel delivers a dramatic speech to her at the end, showing his love and restoring their relationship, it feels utterly unearned.

The film is not just an ungainly monument to the greatness of baseball, it is also an act of total hubris on Kevin Costner's behalf. Only someone as notoriously self-loving as Costner would cast himself as a beloved sports icon that has his greatest night without even realizing it, despite age and circumstances being against him, the film around him heaping praise on the character at every turn. Despite so clearly being a product of Costner's ego, he seems rather detached from the material. The moments of him muttering to himself on the pitcher's mound, reflecting on his life, show a little bit of that all-American, midwestern farm boy charm that briefly made Kevin a huge star. Otherwise, he swaggers through some scenes with an unearned cocksure smile and others with a dopey frown of defeat on his face. The film represents Costner's acting ability at its most maudlin, reaching for grasping, weeping emotion without deciding if the character is even likable in the first place. (By the way, Costner was vocally bent with the studio that they cut his full frontal nude scene, because his ego was such at the time that he assumed all of America wanted to see his cock. I can't imagine that sight adding much to the narrative.)

Co-starring alongside Costner is Kelly Preston as Jane. In some scenes, Preston does fairly well. She is funny and manages to generate a sly smile with some of the cute dialogue she's given. She even manages to make that ridiculous line about “Is baseball not America's greatest game?!” feel impassioned, even if it's still totally unbelievable. At the same time, Preston has zero chemistry with Costner. She seems visibly uncomfortable in their romantic scenes and all too realistic in the scenes where she's fed up with his bullshit. We really didn't do right by Preston. This film was sandwiched between “Jack Frost” and “Battlefield Earth,” so it's amazing she still has a career at all.

If nothing else, Raimi does assemble a decent supporting cast. John C. Reilly appears as Costner's baseball BFF. He brings that same easy-going charm and folksy best buddy quality that Reily excels at to the part, being one of the more humane elements of the film. Before casting him as J. Jonah Jameson, Raimi cast J.K. Simmons here as a couch who is less hard-assed than you'd expect, even if Simmons makes delivering route dialogue seem fun. The role of the team owner probably could've been played as a feckless villain but Brian Cox brings an impressive amount of humanity. The sole element of the film that seemed to receive some praise was Jena Malone's performance as Jane's teenage daughter, who slowly warms up to Costner. She received a few minor award nominations for her acting here. Malone is shockingly funny and likable, especially in a bizarre scene where she walks in on Kevin eating bread and milk.

So are there any signs at all that Sam Raimi directed this movie and that it didn't, in fact, emerged fully-formed from Kevin Costner's id? A few. The scenes of baseballs being tossed into gloves do have a small amount of that energy and motion that you associate with Raimi. The moments when Costner “turns off the machine” and centers himself on the mound, the noise of the stadium vanishing and the crowds of people disappearing, have a slightly stylized edge to them. Though the film has its share of montages, none of them feel especially Raimi-esque. There's all of one P.O.V. shot of a baseball being tossed into a mitt. I honestly expected the movie to mostly composed of that, so it's a little disappointing. That seems like a real missed opportunity.

There's one other way “For Love of the Game” is an obvious, maudlin motion picture. Its use of music is surprisingly awful. Basil Poledouris, one of the greatest film composers to ever live, hits a career low with an unimaginative score full of generic, “sweeping” and “inspiring” themes. More over, the film's musical cues were chosen with sledge hammer obviousness. Uninspired covers of “Paint It Black,” “Something So Right” and “Baby Love” blast over the soundtrack. Standards from Steely Dan, Bob Dylan, and Roy Orbison crop up in all the moments you'd expect. The film's romantic ballads, of which there are three or four, are as overdone and bathetic as the movie they were made to spruce up.

”For Love of the Game” is also insanely slow. It's almost as glacially paced and overly long as an actual baseball game. The film runs at two hours and seventeen minutes and feels closer to four. I can't tell you how hard I was fighting sleep through this watch. It's undoubtedly Sam Raimi's weakest film, obviously because it feels the least like something he would actually make. But I kind of get it. If you started your career pouring fake blood all over Bruce Campbell's face in a rickety old cabin, you would probably wonder what making a prestige sports movie with a once-massive movie star would be like too. [Grade: D]