Now Showing: Any Given Sunday • The Talented Mr. Ripley

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Candid Reviews of Movies
Just Hitting the Big Screen

by Cole Smithey

Any Given Sunday
Playing Football For The Coach — Oliver Stone Packages Football As A Metaphor For The Diminishing American Male Experience.

Director Oliver Stone sensationalizes every topic he takes on to such a ridiculously extreme level that the words ‘dramatic license’ don’t come close to describing the lengths that he goes to render a definitive article. So it comes as no surprise that in tackling the subject of professional football Stone enumerates everything from shower room cock shots, injury induced drug pumping, and American race relations, to an overt sense of melancholic reverence for football’s tradition, with familial sacrifice tossed in as icing for his slice of cinematic mud cake. Stone’s self-aggrandizing agenda is so exploitation heavy that he knows no restraint in cinematic quackery, inside jokes, and forced bravado. Jarring jolts of macro to microcosm camera shots continually plague the visual aspect of the film while male and female chest-beating dramatic scenes refuse audience empathy on anything more than a witness level. Although the movie has five credited music composers, their work is buried beneath an unrelenting, heavy-handed hip-hop and rap soundtrack that drowns the action.

Any Given Sunday sets up each of its characters as self-righteous symbols of some mispronounced ethic. Miami Sharks coach Tony D’Amato (Al Pacino - Scarface) is easily recognizable as a man so afraid of personal relations that he has squandered his own wife and children in favor of hiding behind the reality of his job. Alcoholic and raspy, Tony’s character fits snugly between upcoming young rebel quarterback Willie Beaman (Jamie Foxx - Booty Call) and aging and injured quarterback “Cap” Rooney (Dennis Quaid - The Big Easy). Tony shares Cap’s age and value system for football’s place in American history but is being worn down by a losing season and a dead-end lifestyle. Conflicts with team owner Christina Pagniacci (Cameron Diaz - The Mask) coincide with Tony’s on-the-field problems with Willie who takes to calling “bootleg” plays in the huddle. Where Tony negotiated his original contract with Christina’s now-deceased father by a “handshake and a beer,” Christina thinks nothing of publicly insulting Tony in her bid to get rid of him.

As the plot lurches through five football games worth of slow-motion bone-crunching brutality the primary question seems not to be Tony’s standard of “The point is — can you win or lose like a man?” but more “How can an American man, black or white, hope to survive the constant physical and social pounding that they are put through regardless of their ethics?” Football players are shown to obviously sacrifice their bodies for a fame and fortune that most will squander but even secondary characters, like the team’s scrupulous internist Dr. Ollie Powers (Matthew Modine - Full Metal Jacket) learns to doubt his Hippocratic Oath. Stone is not interested in defining possible answers for the question but rather raises it as a brief flag to get the audience’s attention and distract them further from identifying the Any Given Sunday’s lack of vision.

The film’s most gratifying moment comes from a scene where Tony fires Dr. Harvey Mandrake (James Woods - Videodrome) the team’s smarmy orthopedist. Mandrake has purposefully suppressed life-threatening information from a player because he already knows what the player’s response would be. James Woods shamelessly steals the scene from Pacino and takes a bite out of the movie for himself. As Woods proved with his work on Stone’s Salvador, to be an actor under Oliver Stone one must steal everything if the audience is to have anything to sink its teeth into.

Any Given Sunday’s overflowing sub-plots pile up on one another like a Pakistani train wreck. Stone repeatedly super-imposes inexplicable night shots of white lightening piercing through clouds. This inept image system portrays a manifest energy that the film itself desires but never achieves. If ever there was a feature film director with a commercial director bursting inside him to get out it is Oliver Stone. Stone shows himself able to deal with significant dramatic elements like character and story arc only in 3 to 10 minute intervals. Simply because he can string them together for two-and-a-half hours does not mean that he’s actually made a movie.

The Talented Mr. Ripley
No Exit — Mr. Ripley Is Too Talented To Finish The Movie.|

It’s difficult to watch director Anthony Minghella’s (The English Patient) The Talented Mr. Ripley without being reminded of another adroit American impostor who embraced murder as a means to liberty — Andrew Cunanan, Gianne Versace’s killer. But where Cunanan was finally trapped before his suicide, no such closure is given to the deadly Mr. Ripley. As Tom Ripley (flawlessly played by Matt Damon) weasels his repressed homosexual habit from Manhattan washroom attendant to ex-patriot Italian playboy under the tutelage of his target of desire, Princeton graduate Dickie Greenleaf (Jude Law - eXistenz), the audience is drawn into rooting for the villain. However unlike Gangster movies of the ’30s, where cinema audiences were first taught to cheer for the scoundrel, The Talented Mr. Ripley never sees its way clear to punish its diabolical protagonist. In the context of Ripley’s desperate grab for wealth and image this could be the first truly pro-narcissist Hollywood film to compromise an audiences’ attention.

The setting is 1958 when Tom gets handed a thousand dollars and a trip to Italy by Herbert Greenleaf (James Rebhorn) to retrieve his headstrong son Dickie. Herbert wrongly assumes that Tom’s (temporarily borrowed) Princeton jacket indicates Tom’s necessary friendship with Dickie from their Princeton days. Aside from being a skilled mimic and handwriting forger Tom is a master of minimal repartee in allowing those around him to fill in conversational holes for an imagined response they want to hear. Like a fine poker player Tom ingratiates himself into Dickie’s and his fiancee Marge’s (Gwyneth Paltrow) lives in Italy with a freshly studied knowledge of Jazz and his awkward clean-cut charm. But as Tom wears out his welcome events swell toward Dickie spurning Tom’s “boring” company. Just when Tom thinks he has a shot at usurping Marge’s place in Dickie’s personal life as brothers that neither ever had Dickie and Marge have been talking marriage. Hell hath no fury like an imitator scorned and so Tom comes to taste the pleasures of living the rich life under two identities by way of murder.

Like the well-woven Hitchcock thriller Vertigo that The Talented Mr. Ripley elicits, sumptuous layers of saturated colors coat each scene in a mesmerizing comic book relief that sticks to your eyeballs. Even Tom’s low-rent apartment in the film’s beginning, with jazz album sleeves tossed around a small phonograph, imbues an idyllic sense of material prosperity. The seductive look and feel that cinematographer John Seale captures in Italy’s blissful surroundings serve as a pendulum of counterpoint to Tom’s mannered offensive on Dickie’s very identity. A Gatsbyesque tone coils its way around the movie in an ultra romantic body of suspense that is eventually rendered impotent by the film’s end due to Minghella’s irresponsible sense of climax. In cinema there must always be a crisis decision by the protagonist else the dramatic arc of the entire narrative is negated. Tom Ripley changes color like a chameleon but he never has a crisis decision.

Ripley tries to kick sand on a tense meeting with a private detective by remarking, “When you see where you live from a distance, it’s like a dream, isn’t it?” It’s a crucial moment because Tom’s diverting comment is transparent bullshit that the investigator sees through even though he hasn’t concluded Tom’s obvious guilt in two murders. Tom’s metaphor translates easily to American audiences as a mirror on the soul of a take-no-prisoners capitalist system that breeds Tom Ripleys in droves.

By the end of the story, audience empathy is stretched over to Marge as the only intuitive person to realize Tom’s guilt. To the audience’s questioning of why it has sympathized so strongly with Tom as a vision of the ultimate social climber, Minghella provides a homosexual relationship between Tom and musical conductor Peter (Tom’s newly found mark). Tom is seen shifting into a new persona as an emotionally tortured soul to satisfy Peter’s perceived desires. Minghella holds onto this final conceit as a false bottom which the audience must find its own way to see beyond. But in so doing he cracks a cardinal rule that all film must be life-affirming. Evidently Mingella agrees with Mr. Ripley’s author Patricia Highsmith’s sentiment that Tom is ‘a rather civilized person who kills when he absolutely has to.’ It may not be a view that many audiences will make such a huge ethical leap to endorse.