Year: 1973
Cast: Robert De Niro, Michael Moriarty, Vincent Gardenia, Phil Foster, Heather MacRae, Ann Wedgeworth, Tom Ligon, Tom Signorelli, Danny Aiello, Selma Diamond, Barbara Babcock, Patrick McVey, Marshall Efron, Barton Heyman
Director: John Hancock
Nominations: Best Supporting Actor (Gardenia)
I'm not much on sports, but I've never really had a problem with sports movies. Probably because they're more about people than about the game.
Robert De Niro and Michael Moriarty star as two players for the fictional New York Mammoths team. Moriarty is Henry Wiggin, an over-educated pitcher who sells insurance on the side and has had a book published, earning him the nickname "Author".
De Niro is Bruce Pearson, a decidedly not bright hick who routinely gets picked on by the other players, except for Henry, who tries to treat him fairly, mostly out of pity.
The movie starts with Henry having driven Bruce to the Mayo Clinic, where he's been informed he has terminal Hodgkin's. Eventually they get back to New York where Henry, who's been holding out on renewing his contract trying to negotiate for a better deal, learns that the team's owners are planning to cut Bruce in favor of Piney Woods (Tom Ligon), a hot new catcher with rebel tendencies. Upset that life seems to be handing a series of bum deals to a man who seems to have no malice toward anyone and whose only crime is not being smart, Henry agrees to his contract offer, but on the condition that from now on, he and Bruce are a package deal. They want him, they have to sign Bruce, too, and if they are thinking of cutting Bruce or sending him the minors, Henry will go too. The coach, Dutch Schnell, is livid when the owners accept this, as he was looking forward to his new catcher, and is dumbfounded that Henry would stick his neck out for the guy who's so dumb he's become the team joke.
Oh, and just how dumb is Bruce? Well, for one thing, he can't seem to figure out that Henry's name isn't "Arthur", which is how he hears the word "author". Also, he's never been invited to play a game of Tegwar with his teammates. We'll talk about that in a moment.
Henry thinks it would be bad for the team to know what's happening with Bruce, but Dutch is determined to find out why Henry is doing this. He knows Henry would never have done this for another player; why this dunce? His quest to find out what happened on the trip Henry and Bruce took, and why they came back with Henry willing to stick with Bruce like this, coupled with his continued witnessing how the other players are still treating Bruce, who he has started to see as an actual friend, and on top of that trying to keep Bruce from screwing up the rest of his life with bad decisions, has Henry finally tell just one teammate about Bruce's condition. And from there, well, you tell one person on a team something and you might as well tell them all.
Bruce, meanwhile, has decided to change his beneficiary to his recent girlfriend, Katie (Ann Wedgeworth), instead of his parents, who are suffering financially. Henry thinks, and he's not wrong, that Katie is a gold digger who planted the idea of making her his beneficiary into Bruce's head.
This is a fine film, even if ultimately it does feel a bit inconsequential to me. I wasn't really that invested in the plot, to be honest, and while I did like the interplay between Moriarty and De Niro, I felt like some of the drama was sucked out by us knowing from the film's opening moments that Bruce is dying, so that when in the end, Henry narrates to us that Bruce passed a few weeks after officially retiring, my response was to wonder how he managed to last so long. It's actually a plot point that even as his disease progresses, his finally being accepted on the team has him playing better than he ever has. If anything I started wondering if the film was going to pull a cop-out and have his diagnosis be wrong, but, spoilers, I guess, it doesn't do that, but still seems to have a satisfying ending.
Michael Moriarty is just fine as Henry Wiggin, who as I understand it is the protagonist of four books by Mark Harris, of which Bang the Drum Slowly was the second. Strangely enough, there didn't seem to be much character there to work with; the movie mostly has Henry reacting to Bruce's illness and the ensuing fallout from that. Without Bruce, there wouldn't be a story, which is probably why people think of this movie as focusing on De Niro's character, when in fact he's more a plot device than a character himself.
As for the always dependable De Niro, here he is, pre-Oscar nominations of any kind, already a rising movie star, and when he opens his mouth, 2019 Woody Harrelson comes out. No, I'm serious, watch the movie. He's freaking Woody Harrelson, so much so that I'd accuse him of just mimicking Harrelson if Harrelson hadn't been a young preteen boy at the time.
What I really liked about the film was the concept of Tegwar, a card game the teammates all play together that they frequently rope fans into as well. Bruce has never been asked to play, and he asks Henry about it and why he's never included. It turns out that "TEGWAR" means "The Exciting Game Without Any Rules", which means that the players rope in fans to play, most of them just thrilled to be playing cards with their favorite baseball players, and the players make up the rules as they go along, making up names for winning hands like "Double-Birdie", "Banjo", "Red Rooster", etc., and if the mark (the fans) get a similar hand, they make up a reason why this time it's not a double-birdie, but could have been if it was a different version of the game, or different day of the week. It was a clever little running gag.
But as always, I gotta talk about the reason this film made it onto this blog; Vincent Gardenia in the role of flustered coach Dutch Schnell, who received a nomination for Best Supporting Actor for this performance.
And I gotta say, Gardenia's nomination this year really brings home to me a fact I've known more or less from the beginning but never really allowed myself to think about, and that is that sometimes people get nominated for Oscars and you can't really tell why. Sometimes it appears to be little more than blind, stupid luck. This is why every year there's a nominee, or more than one, that has people going "are you kidding me? How did they get nominated?" or sometimes it's more like "wow, they got nominated. That's good, even if I didn't think it was gonna happen."
I keep wondering if Gardenia got his nod thanks to the number of nominations going to Martin Balsam in Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams, Max von Sydow in The Excorcist, Dustin Hoffman in Papillon, Harvey Keitel in Mean Streets or perhaps Robert Shaw in The Sting cancelling each other out. There's nothing bad about Gardenia's performance, but what was all that good about it? What made people watch this movie, in which he gives a relatively one-note performance in a role that could have been played the same way by any number of different character actors and think "yeah, he deserves an Oscar nomination"?
Having seen all the nominated performances in this category this year, I think I can safely say that Gardenia's nomination must have been one of those "you're kidding me" surprises that happen every year, that articles were written asking why he got one instead of one of the names I mentioned above. None of the others have me wondering "what on earth got him on the shortlist?" in quite the same way.
I'll be posting more on the nominees in this category as the week goes on, but it might take me a while to finish the year, because I want to watch a couple of films that relate to the nominees this year from previous Oscar years. One of them, The Last Picture Show, I already watched, because for 1973 I'm watching The Paper Chase, and both films star Timothy Bottoms, an actor whose film career kinda fizzled as he got older and he's now mostly doing TV guest spots. He was projected to be the next big thing back in the early 70's it's kinda fascinating to me how quickly he was forgotten, considering that very early in his career, while still a very young man, he headlined two major Oscar-winning movies.
Before I watch The Sting I want to see Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, both of them movies that starred Paul Newman and Robert Redford and were directed by George Roy Hill, but Butch Cassidy came first.
None of these, though, prevent me from discussing the other Best Supporting Actor nominees, so I'll keep theses posts coming as the week goes on, next up being The Exorcist. Lock your doors and put away the Ouija boards.
No comments:
Post a Comment