Oliver Stone's Endless, Exhausting 1999 Football Melodrama Any Given Sunday is a LOT, Some of It Good!
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Through an unfortunate fluke of scheduling, this ended up being a two Oliver Stone movie week for me. I wrote up Savages for The Travolta/Cage Project as well as Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 and covered it and Knowing for Travolta/Cage. Now I am traveling back in the timeline for the 1999 football melodrama Any Given Sunday.
Watching and writing about all of Stone’s films in chronological order for a kind patron has only strengthened my intense dislike of the bad boy auteur but it’s also blessed me with low expectations.
If I might give Any Given Sunday the very faintest of praise, I didn’t hate it! It’s not completely worthless! It has things going for it! Compared to the ferociously terrible Savages, it’s a towering masterpiece!
Any Given Sunday’s greatest strength is a star-making performance from Jamie Foxx as Willie Beamen, a third-string quarterback who becomes a phenomenon.
Foxx replaced Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs in the all-important role due to either scheduling conflicts with the producer/mogul/rapper/actor’s recording career or Combs’ rumored inability to throw a football.
Since Combs would be playing a superstar quarterback whose spectacular raw talent makes him an instant pop icon, not being able to convincingly make or fake a pass would be a big detriment.
It certainly didn’t help that Any Given Sunday would have been the neophyte actor’s first film role and a sizable, demanding and crucial one at that.
Foxx, a stand-up comedian, In Living Color alum and sitcom star whose last two film roles were as Bunz in 1997’s Booty Call, a motion picture every bit as dignified as its title would suggest, and Ice Cube’s strip club drama The Player’s Club stepped into the role and emerged a star.
Like the character he unforgettably plays, Foxx entered a bullshit white man’s system intent on reducing him to a body and a set of lazy stereotypes and distinguished himself through raw talent, ambition and audacity.
Despite his reputation as a provocateur and troublemaker, there’s something deeply traditional and retro about Oliver Stone’s sensibility. He will forever remain a wide-eyed kid who looked up to macho heroes like John F. Kennedy and Vince Lombardi as gods who taught multiple generations how to be men.
In Any Given Sunday Al Pacino’s Tony D’Amato represents football’s glorious past, a distinguished legacy in danger of being sacrificed at the altar of money, ratings and change, horrible, horrible change.
Republicans
Dennis Quaid’s thirty-eight year old star quarterback Jack "Cap" Rooney also embodies all that’s honorable and decent about football’s storied history and all that other bullshit.
The film’s character arc calls for the arrogant black man to come to appreciate the natural grace of his caucasian colleague and wildly expectorating mentor but Foxx bends the film to his will through sheer magnetism and force of personality.
Any Given Sunday opens with a quarterback apocalypse. Starting quarterback Jack "Cap" Rooney and back-up quarterback Tyler Cherubini (Pat O’Hara) are hurt in the same cataclysmic half.
D’Amato puts in Willie Beamen, who vomits out of anxiety but then rises to the occasion. He’s brash and rebellious but also spectacularly talented and he quickly becomes a sensation, complete with his own embarrassing rap video.
Pacino’s passionate head coach tries to bond with his new star quarterback in part by talking about music with him. He offers to make a mix-tape of his favorite jazz artists for the intense, brooding young man but Willie instead says he’s into Trick Daddy.
The much older man unconvincingly says he’s familiar with Trick Daddy but that’s unfortunately the end of it. I sincerely hope that in a vault somewhere there is a solid half hour of Willie Beamen and Tony D’Amato discussing the intricacies and highs and lows of Trick Daddy’s complete discography.
The theatrical cut of Any Given Sunday does not have that but it has just about everything else. It is a maximalist endeavor that’s about race and class and money and tradition and professional athletes as both modern day gladiators and an exploited class that put their bodies and minds on the line every Sunday for the economic benefit of rich white owners.
At two hours and thirty seven minutes, Any Given Sunday can feel like it’s documenting an entire football season in real time but it needs that time and space for a crazily over-stuffed cast full of real NFL players and coaches, most notably Jim Brown as the Sharks’ old school defensive coordinator and Lawrence Taylor as a linebacker nearing the end of an auspicious career.
Any Given Sunday needs a bloated running time to handle an over-abundance of unnecessary subplots screaming for the cutting room floor. Stone apparently kept calling Ann-Margret, who plays the widow of the team’s former owner and the mother of its ruthlessly pragmatic and non-sentimental current owner Christina Pagniacci (Cameron Diaz) back to the set to film more scenes that ended up on the cutting room floor.
That seems sadistic and perverse considering how much time Stone found for every other actor, subplot and groaning sports cliche.
Stone and cinematographer Salvatore Totino—who made his debut here because Stone’s usual DP Robert Richardson was off shooting Bringing Out the Dead for Martin Scorsese—labor under the delusion that nothing in the wide world of sports is as riveting as massive bodies crashing artlessly together with the possible exception of the ball being thrown long distances in a perfect spiral.
To the film’s detriment, when it comes to football action, Stone invariably favors bone-crushing spectacle and visceral force over coherence. That approach proves exhausting rather than exciting, draining rather than fun.
Any Given Sunday is shameless in its recycling of hoary sports movie conventions, whether that means a game-ending play to win the big game, a veteran risking serious injury to play one final game or the coach delivering a big speech about how football, like life, is ultimately a game of inches.
Pacino delivers a performance of tremendous quantity and variable quality. He’s in full-on “Hoo hah!” Scent of the Woman Oscar mode throughout here. He alternates between deafening volume and quiet intensity, shouting many of his lines and whispering others.
Pacino’s big speech during the big game is pure hokum. It’s something we’ve seen countless times before but it works all the same because of the earnest conviction Pacino brings to it.
I ended up liking Any Given Sunday more the second time around, in no small part because I was watching it as someone deeply nostalgic for the late 1990s rather than as someone living at the end of the millennium.
When I was a young critic I used to complain when I felt that movies were dated. That now that seems ridiculous. Any Given Sunday could not be more 1999. That’s much of what I like about it.
It’s been nearly a quarter century since Any Given Sunday’s release. The film is now a part of football history itself, arguably the biggest football movie of all time.
Any Given Sunday is a work of wild, deliberate excess, the kind of movie where a hedonistic running back played by L.L Cool J snorts cocaine off the naked breasts of a stripper. There’s a lot about it that is dreadful and overwrought in the grand tradition of Stone’s films but also a fair amount that enjoyed, particularly Foxx’s incendiary performance and Pacino’s scenery-chewing.
I only have four movies left to go in my journey through Oliver Stone’s complete filmography and even though I have disliked the vast majority of his films I nevertheless will miss him at least a tiny bit when it’s all over.
Maybe it’s Stockholm Syndrome, but there’s something about the messiness and over-reaching of Any Given Sunday I found compelling and endearing as well as moderately obnoxious.
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