‘Any Given Sunday’: There’s a Penalty Flag on the Field

NEW YORK — Most Super Bowls leave you wishing you’d gone to the movies instead. Still, I can think of three, maybe four Super Bowls that were as good as any movie about football ever made.

One of them, the 1991 Super Bowl between the Buffalo Bills and the New York Giants, had the kind of tense backdrop (Gulf War anxiety), dramatic contrasts (Buffalo’s lightning strike vs. the Jersey time warp), throat-catching suspense (Mark Ingram makes a first down!) and bittersweet ending (Scott Norwood’s kick goes wide right!) that would have made David O. Selznick rise to his feet in tears. No football movie has come close to it.

That goes for “Any Given Sunday,” though not for lack of trying. Oliver Stone does everything he can to push your senses in the pit with Sunday’s soldiers. When Jamie Foxx’s (Steamin’) Willie Beamen scrambles in the backfield looking for an open receiver, you’re making the same frantic, spur-of-the-moment reads as he does. If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to “hear footsteps” of a 375-pound building-with-legs heading for your rib cage at 65 miles per hour, Stone’s on-field sequences make you feel the pain as few feature films have ever attempted.

And when Foxx’s quarterback talks to Al Pacino’s head coach about a racist coach in his past who wanted to make him a cornerback because of his “quick feet,” the movie opens a window on race and sports too often ignored by the Hollywood sausage factory.

Then again, race is just one of the many things Stone throws in the blender, whether it’s team doctors looking the other way when a player has a life-threatening injury or such touching domestic scenes as the veteran quarterback (Dennis Quaid) getting his face slapped by his Barbie-on-steroids wife (Lauren Holly) because he wants to bail out of the game while he can still walk. (Stone seems to have a scoop here. Decades of up-close-and-personal network sound bites have conditioned us to believe that players’ wives are the ones who have to drag their men off the field kicking and screaming.)

No matter how many imaginative ways “Any Given Sunday” questions the win-at-any-cost morality of professional sport, it ends up doing what football movies from Harold Lloyd’s 1925 silent comedy “The Freshman” have always done: project self-actualizing fantasies onto a Big Game that their heroes always win. Indeed, not only do Stone’s protagonists win the Big Game, but Pacino’s coach also nails a postseason shot against the corporation that’s been slapping his ego around for most of the movie. This may send the audience home happy. But it still feels as if the movie sells out its own iconoclasm for the usual sis-boom-bah.

Then, too, even the best sports movies come into being because of a need to express ways the purity of the game--any game--redeems the pettiness, corruption and vice associated with sport. Here’s an easy way to remember the formula: “Game” is hope, ecstasy, self-fulfillment. “Sport” is hype, exploitation, self-destruction. Got it? Now back to the action. . . .

Of the many football movies that have dramatized this tension, the most outrageous--and outrageously funny--remains Robert Aldrich’s “The Longest Yard” (1974), in which inmates (led by Burt Reynolds at his callow best) and guards at a maximum-security prison are goaded by a sleazy hypocritical warden (Eddie Albert) into playing a full-contact, no-holds-barred football game. As does “Any Given Sunday,” “The Longest Yard” conveys roller-coaster recklessness with its material. Yet for all its not-so-subtle political satire and over-the-top violence, it too lets its antiheroic cons win one for the audience.

“North Dallas Forty,” released in 1979, is one of the few football movies ever made that dared to bypass a climactic Ultimate Victory. Which may explain why it was such a hard sell, even in the late 1970s, when pessimism was hip.

Few football movies have matched the smoke-cured realism of that all-but-forgotten Ted Kotcheff adaptation of Peter Gent’s best-selling novel about a broken but not yet beaten wide receiver (Nick Nolte) for the North Dallas Bulls. It scores some of the same points off pro football’s thick hide--especially the bewildering distinction made by pro teams between sanctioned and non-sanctioned drug abuse--that Stone’s movie does, though with less solemnity and keener wit.

“North Dallas Forty” may still struggle to connect with audiences because it retains a clumsy, low-tech feel. But that, too, is part of its charm. It’s like watching a “Dilbert” cartoon in shoulder pads and cowboy boots: The organization men who growl and snap at Nolte’s maverick-hippie pass catcher show themselves to be no different from--and no better than--white-collar bosses everywhere who break spirits as easily as linebackers break ankles.

When John Matuszak vents his frustration at an assistant coach (played by Charles Durning) after a heartbreaking loss, he speaks for more than pro athletes when he shouts, “I want some . . . feeling! Every time I call it a game, you call it a business! But every time I call it a business, you call it a game!”

Hearing that cry from the soul is, for some of us, even better than a winning touchdown. But what do we know? Maybe it’d be different if we played big games instead of just watching them.