MasterChugs Theater: ‘Any Given Sunday’

As a cinematic flasher of not-so-secret mass culture fantasies, Oliver Stone is Hollywood’s R-rated answer to P. T. Barnum. Instead of clowns, aerialists and lion tamers, he parades his own hyper-macho vision of modern American life as a primitive bread-and-circuses carnival of power, greed, lust, fame and violence (especially violence). And in Any Given Sunday, his viscerally charged, razzle-dazzle ode to professional football as a blood sport, he comes up with some quintessentially zany Oliver Stone moments.

Using the film, Stone dissects the glory and decadence of football, as seen through the stunning victories and stinging defeats of the fictitious Miami Sharks. Stone presents the players of the NFL as modern-day gladiators who do battle before bloodthirsty crowds in multi-million dollar coliseums, where on any given Sunday, you either win or lose. And while the veteran director has assembled some top-notch talent for this ode to the American past time, the film’s potential for being one of the great films of 1999 ends up being sabotaged by Stone’s own directorial indulgences, which almost make it unwatchable. Almost.

Al Pacino is Tony D’Amato, the tireless and intense coach of the Miami Sharks, a man who has spent much of his life on the field, acting as a surrogate father to the men of the team. D’Amato is a man who lives for the game, and has paid for the team’s past victories with his own blood, losing his wife and daughters in the process. At the film’s opening, it is in the middle of a bad season for the Sharks, a situation which is quickly compounded by the loss of the team’s star quarterback, Jack Rooney, on account of a serious back injury that may completely scuttle his long and distinguished career.

With the faint hope of salvaging a bad season, D’Amato sends out third-string quarterback Willie Beamin, played by Jamie Foxx, an untried rookie with a chip on his shoulder the size of a boulder. Fortunately, Beamin delivers a few spectacular plays and wins, which ends up putting the team back on track for the play-offs. However, the victories do not come cheap-Beamin repeatedly ignores D’Amato’s plays, and the newfound fame quickly goes to his head, angering both his team-mates and D’Amato. The divisions on the field are further exacerbated when the team’s MBA-brandishing owner, Christina Pagniacci, perched atop her ivory tower, pushes to put Rooney out to pasture, replacing him with flavor-of-the-month Beamin. Meanwhile, another conflict is brewing on the team’s medical staff, as the older Dr. Harvey Mandrake and the green Dr. Al Powers come to blows over whether to allow injured players to go back onto the field before they have fully recovered.

And so like any good epic, the battle lines are drawn in large bold strokes: duty versus conscience, loyalty versus money, experience versus ambition, old school versus new school, and individual glory versus being a team player. As the all-important playoffs loom closer in the horizon, D’Amato finds himself the only one capable of bringing the team together for one last shot at bringing back the glory days of the Miami Sharks.

Also along for the championship drive and some unintentional laughs is Cameron Diaz as Pagniacci, who inherited the Sharks from her late father and apathetic and slightly tipsy mother Margaret, convincingly played by Ann Margret. Though Cameron remembers all her dialogue and delivers it with startling conviction, not for one tick of the game clock is she believable as the owner of a pro-football team. But she does make a nice treat for the eyes after all the sweaty grimacing men.

Much more believable are Jack Roony and Willie “Steamin” Beamen as the testy tortoise and the hyper hare making up the movie’s quarterback controversy. Dennis Quaid bulked up as did all the athlete/actors who went through an eight-week football training camp to gear up for their gridiron glories. Quaid also resembles real-life Miami Dolphin quarterback Dan Marino who is going through a late career crisis of his own. Coincidentally, Marino’s sprawling waterfront home was used as the house of Quaid’s QB Jack Roony. It’s a real nice place, so nice, in fact, that Quaid’s movie wife Cindy surprisingly slaps him silly at the thought of Roony retiring.

Jamie Foxx performs admirably as Willie Beamen, the third-string QB who is thrust by the injury and incompetence of his predecessors into a leadership role on the team. Of course all the gold, glory and girls increase Steamin’ Beamen’s helmet size faster than he can say “Time out!” and he’s got to make peace with himself and the team before it’s too late for the season and the audience’s attention span.

Unfortunately, about halfway through, it seems as though Stone changes his mind on what he set out to accomplish. Instead of reviling what football has become in an age of multi-million dollar deals and endorsements, the story starts to embrace, almost celebrate, ‘the way things are done’. For example, decisions motivated by greed in the first half end up becoming acceptable in the second half. It is at this point, sadly, where the film turns into a semi-archetypal sports film that celebrates unabashed male bravado, where winning is everything, regardless of the cost, irrevocably losing nearly all the goodwill developed in the first half.

And that’s a big problem. Despite its near three-hour running time, Any Given Sunday succumbs quickly to the standard sports-movie formula-complete with “The Big Game” finale. This is perhaps inevitable for a movie in this genre. However, with few surprises and little to say in this film, it is unclear why Oliver Stone was interested in making it in the first place. And in the end the movie cops out. Although the story presents many opportunities for tragedy (some situations practically beg for it), the movie turns ludicrously upbeat as it hastily ties all its strands together. P. T. Barnum liked happy endings too. Circus lions are in the ring to be tamed, aerialists are expected not to fall. The final message of Any Given Sunday is one big thumbs up: Let the games begin.