(out of
four)
By David N. Butterworth
Billy Chapel is having a bad day. He's been told that the Detroit Tigers, for which
he's had, until recently, a spectacular pitching career, will soon be sold. He's been told
that, come season end, he'll probably be traded to the Giants anyway unless, of course, he
opts to retire. And to cap it all, he's just learned that his girlfriend has taken a job
overseas, and is scheduled to fly out on the next plane to London.
The forty-year-old baseball player, who holds a nineteen-year history with the Tigers,
is in New York for the season finale against the Yankees when the string of bad news comes
down. Standing there on the mound, "the loneliest place on earth," Billy
contemplates his life through a series of flashbacks while pondering the decision to call
it a day.
Every once in a while, Kevin Costner makes a baseball picture to make up for the poor
decisions and lackluster performances that plague his other films.
For every Waterworld and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, there's a Bull
Durham. For every 'Postman and 'Bodyguard there's a Field of Dreams.
With For Love of the Game, Costner (who plays the sanguine Billy Chapel) once again
proves that if you stick him in a baseball movie, they will come and come again.
Costner is very good in this film; he clearly has a passion for America's favorite
pastime. Fortunately the usually flamboyant director Sam Raimi (A Simple Plan)
shows remarkable restraint in allowing that passion to shape the story, rather than his
own show-offy camerawork.
Kelly Preston, whom you might remember from Jerry Maguire, gives Billy's
"blonde of the week" a delightful balance. Preston's Jane is naïve, sensitive,
forthright, and demure, afraid of committing to someone of Billy's stature while at the
same time unable to resist his considerable charms. She's "never had a love
story," according to her teenage daughter Heather, who's nicely played by a well-cast
Jena Malone (Stepmom). Costner and Preston's relationship evolves naturally, from
the time he first spots her with her broken-down car on the freeway, to when they fall
into each other's arms at the airport. It's a familiar story but here it's played out with
sophistication and real human depth.
Although For Love of the Game is essentially a love story with a baseball
setting, such is the dramatic energy of the narrative that when Billy finds himself in the
middle of pitching a perfect game, the clichés dissolve into poignancy and you find
yourself caught up in the excitement. The moment when Billy throws his final pitch is
palpable, and that's as much a tribute to the actor as to the writer and director.
The writing by Dana Stevens, based on Michael Shaara's novel, is always intelligent,
powerful and absorbing, and Basil Poledouris provides a lovely and effective score that
never once gets in the way of the principals. On the baseball diamond, the film has that
poetic quality shared by all the great baseball movies–Bang the Drum Slowly, The
Natural, Eight Men Out ... as well as those two previously-mentioned Costner
vehicles.
Do not, however, dismiss For Love of the Game as "just another Kevin
Costner baseball movie" because as Kevin Costner movies go, baseball or otherwise,
it's one of his best.
