sports

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.