The Greatest Game Ever Played

Written at the time of the film's release...

The Greatest Game Ever Played (Bill Paxton, 2005)
Mark Twain said it best, "Golf is a good walk spoiled."

Director Bill Paxton compounds the error.

Despite the inherent drama of Mark Frost's* account of the David versus Goliath 1913 U.S. Open, Paxton takes the advice to "keep-your-eye-on-the-ball" a bit too literally in order to punch up the movie's visual fireworks. Though Frost has fashioned a good story of contrasts, pitting a renowned British pro--the greatest golfer of his day--against an unseasoned American amateur, Paxton keeps threatening to derail it with fancy camera moves and divot-POV's. It becomes a bit of a crutch; rather than solving the perpetual "make it interesting" challenge of filming golf, the director fashions every power-stroke with a new "fly-away" special effects shot. Once or twice, sure, it is fun. And it's all well and good to try and enliven the proceedings of one of the slowest-moving sports, but the swooshing, spinning flight paths he employs on so many shots become wearying and take away from the human drama, which is where the strength of the story lays.

Fortunately, Paxton's cast couldn't be finer. Shia LaBoeuf's Francis Ouimet is a constant revelation of emotions--he has one of those faces that the camera loves; every thought in his head etches something across his chinless features. By contrast, Stephen Dillane's Harry Vardon is all-laser-beam-intensity, betraying nothing but an iron will. One of Paxton's best moves is a shot of Vardon in the gallery, watching Ouimet play.The faces in the crowd turn their heads following the result of a powerful wood shot, except for the British golfer fixated on the kid's moves. Dillane has been doing more and more impressive work lately...in The Hours, and as Thomas Jefferson in HBO's "John Adams." If Thames wants to stop playing revolving doors with their Sherlock Holmes series on shorts (Richard Roxburgh, Rupert Everett) they could do worse than trying out Dillane as The Great Detective.

Yeah, yeah "He looks so young." 

It's a great story--a heart-warming story, made more so by the fact that it's true.** There was no need to go as overboard as Paxton does. One of the first things you learn in golf is that you do better if you don't try so hard. 

 

Grace wins over power.

* Frost more famously co-created "Twin Peaks" with David Lynch, and also co-wrote the screenplay for "The Fantastic Four" proving that no matter how well you've played before you can still occasionally be below par.

*** It's true a lot--but not completely. AND HERE, THERE BE SPOILERS. Highlight no further.
 

 

 

 

 

--the final score was actually Ouimet - 72, Vardon-77, and Troy-78. It didn't come down to the wire as depicted in the film.

The Hunt for Red October

The Hunt for Red October (John McTiernan, 1989) We're grudging fans of Alec Baldwin in the BXC household, so every so often it's nice to go back and see "serious actor" Baldwin before he stretched his comic chops (an opportunity made common by this film's seeming omnipresence on cable channels these days). "The Hunt for Red October" was a dry-as-a-bone Tom Clancy novel based on a long-rumored incident involving a Russian nuclear submarine accident that Clancy turned into a cat-and-mouse game between a defecting Russian sub commander, and the American and Russian fleets in the North Atlantic. In the book, the action was sometimes intriguing, but the characters were non-existent, right down to the motivations of Captain Ramius, and the novel's Clancy-stand-in-hero Jack Ryan.

Producer Mace Neufeld (who must have had the patience of a saint given his long-term producing relationship with the late Clancy) turned it into a first-class film of intrigue top-heavy with male actors (by my count the only females are two stewardesses, Gates —Star Trek's "Dr. Crusher"—McFadden as Mrs. Ryan, and the kid who plays Ryan's daughter). So, here's the run-down: Baldwin, Sam Neill, James Earl Jones, Scott Glenn, Courtney B. Vance (making the most of a great part), Richard Jordan, Joss Ackland, Stellan Skarsgard, Peter Firth, Jeffrey Jones, Tim Curry, Fred Thompson, plus comedian Rick Ducommun and I swear I see Michael Biehn in the helicopter scene. And as the man everybody talks about, Sean Connery as the Scottishly-accented Lithuaninan Comdr. Ramius.*

It all works, as a spy/adventure story, as a detective story, a military exercise, and a submarine movie...and a character piece. Nobody comes out and says anything about their feelings, but actions define the characters, and with all the sub-time, there's a lot of celluloid of people standing around talking..and for the most part it's good functional talk that propels the movie along. Plus, you'll come away with a gloss of submarine tactics, of sonar capacities, the strategies of "arming" torpedoes, and a healthy respect for the difficulties of landing a jet-aircraft on a carrier during bad weather.** 

Respect also for Baldwin, who managed to make a human being out of the cypher of Jack Ryan through the force of his own personality--his Ryan is something of a geek, like Ben Affleck's later interpretation--and proved himself an adept for actor imitations (nice skewering of Thompson and Connery there, Alec) Plus, a crisp snap to the brim for suggesting and making good on the overhead shot of Ryan cutting his tether from a helicopter to gain entry to an American sub during a violent storm, and looking UP at the camera to make sure we all know it's actually him (pre-CGI) doing the stunt.

There was minimal CGI involved—and in fact, due to budget constraints, the filming of the underwater scenes were as low-tech as you could get—suspended model shots of subs were puppeteered through underwater landscapes filmed in a dry warehouse filled with smoke. Crude particle and wave generation was all that was needed to complete the image. But it's indicative of the back-to-basics approach to The Hunt for Red October--an old-fashioned sea-hunt that satisfies.

* The script, by Donald E. Stewart and Larry Ferguson (who also wrote himself a good part in it) is augmented by dialog commissioned by Connery from one of his favorite writers at the time, John Milius, his director in The Wind and the Lion, and Milius provided him some lovely chewable dialog throughout the thing, as in...this scene. 

** But my favorite moment in the movie is a brilliant stroke--the smooth transition in dialog from Russian to English as Firth's Political Officer reads a passage from a bible owned by Ramius' late wife: the camera moves in on Firth reading the passage--Revelation 16:15-17--(in Russian) and stops on one commonly-pronounced word--"Armageddon"--and when the camera begins to pull back, he continues...in English. It's a neat trick, perfectly strategized and played...like so much of the movie.