Any Given Sunday

Any Given Sunday

“Any Given Sunday,” the movie by Oliver Stone is intelligent sport picture almost drowned in production overkill. Sharp and observant dramatic scenes alternate with MTV-style montages and incomprehensible sports footage. Somehow the underlying story survives anyway.

The story’s expose of pro football will not come as news to anyone who follows the game. Veteran quarterbacks sometimes doubt themselves; injured players take risks to keep playing, team doctors let them, overnight stardom turns a green kid into a jerk, ESPN personalities are self-promoters, owners’ wives drink, their daughters think they know all about football and coaches practice quiet wisdom in the midst of despair. We also are reminded that all big games are settled with a crucial play in the closing seconds.

These insights are not new but Stone and his actors give them human faces and the dialogue scenes in this film work. Comfortable and convincing as Tony D’Amato, a raspy-voiced curmudgeon trying to coach the Miami Sharks past a losing streak and into the playoffs, Al Pacino is surrounded by first-rate performances here (we’re reminded that very little movie material is original until actors transform it from cliches into particulars).

Jamie Foxx does most of his heavy lifting opposite Pacino as Willie Beamen, a third-string quarterback in a game where the two guys above him have been carried off on stretchers; he’s so nervous he throws up in the huddle (“that’s a first,” D’Amato observes), but then catches fire and becomes an overnight sensation, and Foxx doesn’t step wrong in this broken-field role that requires him to be unsure and vulnerable, then cocky and insufferable, then political, then repentant.

The team’s original owner was a sports legend who had made a handshake deal with D’Amato: upon his death control would pass to Tony. But now the owner has died (the mother drinks martinis), and his daughter (Cameron Diaz) is in control of the team. These two characters are written as women who will never really be accepted in a man’s game; the mother knows it but her daughter still doesn’t. Diaz hopes to get rich by moving the franchise; her mother has kept the world of pro football under close observation for many years and has not found much to inspire her.

The veteran quarterback whose injury sets this plot into motion (Dennis Quaid) is seen in an unexpected light, as an on-field leader privately haunted by insecurity; there’s a stunning moment when he considers retirement and is ferociously challenged by his wife (Lauren Holly), who won’t hear of it: he complains, “ever since college, people have been telling me what to do.”

Even at 170 minutes “Any Given Sunday” barely manages to find room for some of its large cast: James Woods and Matthew Modine clash as team doctors with different attitudes toward life-threatening conditions; pro veteran Lawrence Taylor has a strong supporting role as a player who wants to keep playing long enough to earn his bonus, even at the risk of his life, and there are lots of other familiar faces: Charlton Heston, Aaron Eckhart, Bill Bellamy, Jim Brown, LL Cool J, John C. McGinley, Lela Rochon even Johnny Unitas as an opposing coach.

The reason why their characters are not well developed is because the film spends a lot of time on smoke and mirrors. In fact, there isn’t even one sequence of sports action where you can see the strategy behind a play from start to finish. Instead, Stone uses fancy editing on montage closeups of colorful uniforms and violent action, with lots of crunching sound effects. Or he tilts his camera up to a football pass, spinning against the sky. This is razzle-dazzle in the editing; we don’t get the feeling we’re seeing a real game involving these characters.

There’s lots of music, though, and even an MTV music video for Foxx that’s fairly unconvincing. It’s as if Stone wanted to pump up the volume to conceal the lack of on-field substance. In films like “JFK” and “Nixon,’’ there was a feeling of urgent need to get everything in; we felt he had lots more to tell us and would if he could.

“Any Given Sunday’’ feels stretched out, as if the story needed window dressing. It’s as if the second unit came back with lots of full-frame shots of anonymous football players plowing into each other in closeup, and Stone and his editors figured they could use that to mask their lack of substantial, strategic, comprehensible sports action footage. Compounding this problem is that every single play ends in a way that serves drama.

It’s a close call here. I guess I recommend it because the dramatic scenes are worth it. Pacino has some nice heart-to-hearts with Quaid and Foxx, and you capture something about what makes him tick as a coach during those times on screen when his not shouting like mad at someone or another along side all his other antics such as cursing off refs etcetera etcetera etcetera.

But if some studio executive came along and made Stone cut his movie down to two hours, I have a weird feeling it wouldn’t lose much of substance and might even play better.

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