sports

This review may contain spoilers.

Marty Mauser is a confidence man, and the film is built almost entirely out of his energy: when he talks the world seemingly rearranges itself around him. I spent the whole thing wanting him to fail to the point where it coloured my enjoyment of the film.

Some of that is the Safdie method pointed somewhere new. In Uncut Gems, Howard Ratner was unbearable in a similar way, but he was prey: always the smallest man (figuratively) in the room, owing money to bigger ones, hunted through every scene. The sympathy was more structural; you root for anything being chased. Marty has the wind behind him. He gets the components of the underdog (small man, big rivals, sport as the ladder out) while functioning as a predator on everyone within reach. I didn’t enjoy the mismatch.

The consequences do arrive but they’re a little more bureaucratic rather than escalating: too late to enter the Championship because of his own scheming, flying home with GIs because he’s burned his passage, missing the birth of his son. Every closed door in the last act is one he built himself.

And he never seems to notice. He talks his way past each of them exactly as he’s talked his way past everything else, right up to demanding a real rematch with Endo. The confidence man suddenly insisting on the genuine article, perhaps the neatest trick he pulls and, like me, if you aren’t charmed, the one worked on the audience rather than by the character.

Which leaves the recognition nowhere to happen except that final shot: hands clamped over the mouth that ran the whole con, glasses still on, weeping at a baby behind glass in a room full of other people’s children. It’s beautifully played, almost entirely through containment. It’s also the only available location for a humbling the film never dramatises anywhere the camera can see, and the readings I’ve come across all say the same things: trading fame for family, coming to terms, the repercussions sinking in, etc. I don’t agree. He didn’t trade anything. He ran out of options and then cried where nobody could watch him do it. And anyway, who’s to say fatherhood isn’t the next scheme he’s going to try to exploit?

That scandal that Field of Dreams turned into myth, this time told straight. Where the other film lets Shoeless Joe walk out of the corn to be forgiven, this one keeps things factual: how the 1919 White Sox actually threw the World Series, and how they were ruined for it.

Another film I’m mostly watching for John Cusack. Here he plays Buck Weaver, the one who knew the plan, stayed quiet and took nothing. And who still paid the same price as the men who sold out. Not the same as his other characters’ moral slides: here a decent man is ruined for being in the same room. You want him to escape it all and you know he won’t.

Incidentally Strathairn and Sweeney are both good here. Actors you wish the industry had handed bigger careers.

The sort of high-concept swing nobody risks any more (which is of course a small tragedy). What struck me most was this: do this exact film with football and it’d be insufferable, yet with baseball it’s earnest and earned. The mundanities of another country’s sport arrive here as something close to myth. We don’t have that for football. Partly the game’s class baggage, partly a national suspicion of taking it too seriously, of being caught intellectualising a thing that’s meant to be felt. Costner stands in a cornfield talking to ghosts and it plays straight. Try the equivalent featuring a centre-half on a wet Tuesday in the Championship and you’re looking at something vastly different.

Back to this after 15+ years. Gosling and Epps are outstanding, and it quietly avoids white-saviour clichés. Intimate, honest and unsentimental, and I love how the Broken Social Scene songs are woven through it.