# For Love of the Game (1999)

### reviewed by
Harvey S. Karten

    FOR LOVE OF THE GAME

     Reviewed by Harvey Karten
     Universal Pictures
     Director:  Sam Raimi
     Writer:  Dana Stevens, novel by Michael Shaara
     Cast: Kevin Costner, Kelly Preston, John C. Reilly, Jena
    Malone, Brian Cox, Michael Neeley

So you want a woman to like you, to feel desire for you? Forget yohimbe and Spanish fly. Instead, become highly successful, preferably a celebrity. Females are attracted to alpha males the way felines are captivated by catnip. If you're a rock star--or even just a major-league baseball player--don't be surprised if you're surrounded by groupies, people who will offer you everything they have for the mere thrill of being with you, of having your renown rub off on them.

"For Love of the Game" is about a celebrity whose girl friend is no groupie. She's not greatly impressed by her man's name and fame but is nonetheless in love with him. Something keeps them apart, the typical motif of just about every romantic comedy or drama. In films of this nature, the leading man and principal woman have a passion for each other, but a barrier is put in the way of their happiness. Each time they feel the potentiality of getting together for good, something stands in the way. In "For Love of the Game"--about a 40- year-old pitcher for the Detroit Tigers whose life comes simultaneously to a professional and amorous crossroad--a woman's unwillingness to share her man with his love of the game is that obstruction.

Sam Raimi, whose writing and direction run the gamut from cult horror works like "The Evil Dead" to surreal comedies like "The Hudsucker Proxy," appropriately casts Kevin Costner as the middle-aged ball player who has just been traded from the Tigers and is engaged in what may be the last game of his flourishing career. On the mound against the New York Yankees, Billy Chapel (Kevin Costner) meditates upon a romantic attachment of the past five years, talking to himself each time a Yankee comes to bat. Already assured a slot in the Cooperstown Hall of Fame, he wonders whether he will himself strike out in the love department. Jane Aubrey (Kelly Preston) has assured herself a slot in his mind and has fallen for this larger-than-life fellow, but she is not particularly impressed by baseball and needs a full-time husband and not one who is regularly besieged for autographs and importuned by other women. The movie recalls Hal Ashby's messy, disjoined 1985 story "The Slugger's Wife," about a baseball star who falls in love with a singer. The singer, played by Rebecca De Mornay, is not awed by the role of a player's wife who must dutifully follow her hero around and sit in the box seats with the other players' wives.

"For Love of the Game" has a script that is not so much lame as it is predictable and sticky. A feel-good movie in every sense ("Waterboy" for a more mature audience), "For Love of the Game" is overlong at (count 'em) 137 minutes, a span that allows Raimi to display Costner winding up and throwing curves and speedballs as incessantly as those automated games in theme parks. Whenever Yankee Stadium is not in the foreground, Raimi focuses on the off- again, on-again relationship of Billy and Jane, who approach and depart like two dogs, each unsure of the other, who advance and retreat in a comic dance of indecision.

Billy Chapel is about to pitch that most uncommon of rarities, the perfect game. Reminiscing on his life, he takes us back to his youthful days when he had acquired a love of the game, his dad playing catcher to the little-leaguer and encouraging the boy's dream of becoming a big-time hurler. The major portion, however, deals with his relationship over the past five years with Jane Aubrey, whom he meets on the highway when he stops to help her fix her disabled auto. Inviting her to watch him in what turns out to be her first baseball game, he is wrapped up in himself, unaware that she is not as immersed as he in the game and that she is embarrassed to sit with the players' wives (where she overhears one whispering about her being yet another of Billy's girl friends). Following Michael Shaara's posthumously published novel, Dana Stevens's script tracks the progress of the romance, as Jane appears enchanted with Billy's tight- lipped demeanor but annoyed by his lack of focus on her and on her teen-aged daughter Heather (Jena Malone).

While Costner and Preston display reasonable chemistry together, their dialogue is as pat as the ballpark scenes are formulaic. Raimi waxes sentimental in both areas, showing a Billy Chapel who is determined to pitch only to his best friend, catcher, Gus (John C. Reilly) and concerned to the point of mushiness about his wavering girl friend. The film does not display the sharpness of Ron Shelton's 1988 "Bull Durham," largely because the script does not allow Preston to project the charm of Susan Sarandon--who in "Durham" performed as an intellectual groupie who is determined to mature one ball player each season. Well-lit, capably photographed (especially in tracking Billy's whizzing fast balls), "For Love of the Game" is watchable enough but ultimately forgettable.

    Rated PG-13.  Running Time: 137 minutes.  (C) 1999
    Harvey Karten

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