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Movie Review: 'Any Given Sunday' Director Oliver Stone fields a winner in stylish 'Any Given Sunday' Wednesday, December 22, 1999 By Ron Weiskind, Post-Gazette Movie Editor
Who would have dreamed Oliver Stone -- that notorious conspiracy theorist and auteur, that unreconstructed '60s liberal with his revisionist (some would say wholly imagined) view of history -- would turn out to be a team player?
His latest movie, the football drama "Any Given Sunday," rains visual and auditory barrages upon one's senses like shells exploding in a Vietnam rice paddy.
The cuts come rapid-fire, as if edited on a caffeine high. Sometimes, the screen splits into several different images. The soundtrack of rock and rap songs almost never stops, and when players collide on the field, you wonder why the reverberations haven't started an earthquake. But then the camera often shakes as if they have.
Yet beneath the cacophony of sights and sounds, beyond the film's indictment of meddling owners and selfish players and a plantation mentality and medical disregard of serious injuries and anything else Stone could think of, the message of his movie is as old-school as the coach portrayed by Al Pacino.
In the end, it's all about the guys in the huddle, playing together as one, overcoming obstacles (including their own failings) to win. Of course, that was also the message of "Varsity Blues," which was about high-school football, and who knows how many other gridiron flicks.
But if the movie embraces most of the standard pigskin clichés, it also demonstrates why even a filmmaker like Stone (who co-wrote the screenplay with John Logan) would revisit them -- in the right hands, they're still very entertaining. The game sequences in "Any Given Sunday" simply rock and make us feel as close as most of us will get to the experience of playing pro football.
Pacino plays Tony D'Amato, longtime coach of the Miami Sharks of the AFFA (Associated Football Franchises of America). Just four years ago, his team won a second consecutive league championship. But now the Sharks are trying to avoid a four-game losing streak even though their aging quarterback, Jack Rooney (Dennis Quaid), has been knocked out of the game.
All D'Amato has left is third-stringer Willie Beamen (Jamie Foxx), a rookie so green he throws up in the huddle on his first play. But he shows some promise, then blossoms in the next game when he starts ignoring D'Amato's play calls and improvising his own. He also begins to alienate his teammates as he basks in the star treatment.
Adding to the dissension is team owner Christina Pagniacci (Cameron Diaz), who lives up to her team's nickname. As meddling owners go, she makes Art Modell look like Mahatma Gandhi. She publicly backs Willie and criticizes Tony's conservative coaching style, while at the same time trying to blackmail Miami's mayor (Clifton Davis) into building her a new stadium.
Stone never has been magnanimous in his portrayal of women and he doesn't start here. The other key female characters in the movie are a hooker, a drunk and assorted bimbos intent on snaring a rich ballplayer.
Despite the presence in the movie of football greats Jim Brown (as the defensive coordinator) and Lawrence Taylor (as the star linebacker), "Any Given Sunday" contains several unlikely scenarios.
If coach D'Amato needs a player to tell him Beamen is changing plays in the huddle, he probably should go on to his life's work. Beamen becomes a media darling and national magazine cover boy after just 2 1/2 games. A team on a four-game losing streak undergoing as much dissension as the Sharks probably couldn't turn things around if Vince Lombardi himself were coach (his picture shows up repeatedly in the film, which opens with one of his quotes). These guys do an awful lot of partying and boozing for a team with several weeks left in their season.
But we don't necessarily look to Stone for accuracy. His strengths are visceral -- the ferocity of his directing -- and ideological. He doesn't go off any deep ends here, letting issues take a back seat to his characters, which may be what makes the film so accessible. He doesn't force anything except for his busy style. I was surprised the movie moved so quickly, given its running time of nearly three hours.
But "Any Given Sunday" is, after all, just about football and not anything important. Oh. Wait. This is Pittsburgh -- a town with a former Super Bowl team that has lost six in a row and has a controversial quarterback and a coach under fire and an owner suggesting the team should be doing better and fans who take it all as a personal affront.
Geez, Stone. Why'd you waste your time with all those war films?
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Rating: R, for strong language and some nudity/sexuality.