Nothing shows the great pop culture divide between Britain and America more than American football. On virtually any other subject, it’s almost possible to imagine that their concerns are the same. But when American football comes up, an iron curtain of alienation comes down.
The US shrugs at the rest of the world by treating soccer as a game for children, but its passion for football really is a religion – a cold, puritanical religion at that, with its joyless emphasis on work and rigid military strategies.
One of the most extraordinary scenes in Any Given Sunday, Oliver Stone’s chest-beating epic about the national game, is when the testosterone-enriched giants of the Miami Sharks, dazed with Demerol and confused with cortisone, huddle in the changing room in a team prayer, presided over by their official Christian padre.
It’s not ironic; nor does it betoken any particularly transcendental insight. (If there are any Muslims on the team, they kneel obediently with the rest.) And it’s after the game, so there’s no secular motive for revving up the troops. This solemnity is of a piece with the rest of the picture – a film which promises us a tough, searching look at the fanatical world of pro football, but which inevitably ends up bowing the knee to this unsmiling, parochial obsession.
Al Pacino once again does a lot of expressionless shouting as Tony D’Amato, the ageing, has-been coach. This time he does it from the sidelines, wearing a mike headset. He’s tough on the players. He’s tough on himself. But he’s on the skids, and that’s tough.
The Miami Sharks have been losing game after game, and their owner – a friend and protector of Tony’s – has died, bequeathing them to his beautiful, ruthless business-minded daughter Christina (Cameron Diaz). Of course, all she cares about is money, and she has no feeling for the “purity” of the game.
Christina imperiously insists on visiting the steamy locker-room to make a kind of congratulatory royal progress while her big black gladiators are in a state of undress. There is a real frisson of sex, power and money as she coolly approaches her stars before they have had a chance to cover their manhood. And the crunch comes when the superstar new quarterback “Steamin” Willie Beamen (Jamie Foxx) starts hitting on her.
Beamen is the crux of the picture, and Stone has his finest moment with a brilliant sequence with a kind of montage-riff taking off from the rap video Willie has made for his multi-million dollar high-energy drink endorsement deal. And there is something very sleek and sexy about the players dehumanising themselves into robo-warriors. Many is the crunch, the clench, the creak of ruined tendon, the snap of bone: and even an eye torn out and left on the Astroturf. There are three or four or five shots of the spinning, floating, torpedo ball.
In anyone else’s hands, this might look like displacement activity for suppressed sexual violence or martial aggression. In End Zone, novelist Don DeLillo found in it a metaphor for the nuclear strike, and in Tom Wolfe’s A Man in Full, the superstar running back Fareek “The Cannon” Fanon is the locus of all sorts of political tensions. But, ultimately, Stone is just intoxicated with football for itself, the harsh power and slo-mo poetry of stegosaurus-proportioned men and their contest for glory.
This makes for exhilarating cinema at first – but this is a long film, and non-football fans are entitled to ask if there is anything more to it than The Game. Stone peppers his football sequences with black-and-white fragments and snatched memories of games and players past. In JFK or Nixon, this technique disturbingly demonstrated a secret history, a sense of hidden fracture and violation in the past. Here, however, it is just dewy-eyed ancestor worship and an invocation of the great tradition of football.
The racial tensions are resolved pretty painlessly; Beamen gives the white paternalist coach some fierce attitude at the beginning of the picture, but ends up sentimentally endorsing his authority, and there’s no question of ever actually getting it on with the nordic Cameron.
The Miami Sharks also have another cliché on the team: the sinister, cynical physician Dr Mandrake (James Woods), who unscrupulously feeds the guys medicines to keep them going at all costs – even though it means risking their health.
Stone takes it all in with a great panoramic sweep; coyly awarding himself a (pretty big) cameo as a TV commentator whooping and punching the air at what’s happening on the field – thus sending a pretty unsubtle message about how he regards it, and how we ought to regard it too.
It’s a film which suggests you might win or lose on any given Sunday – but can you win or lose like a man, a mensch, an hombre? The win-at-all-costs mentality is criticised. But there’s no prizes for guessing how the last game of the film ends. Much of this is muscular, exciting film-making but, in the end, it’s for fans only.