Yeh, I hadn’t seen this yet, so sue me And I really have no excuse – never mind that it’s one of those movies that “everyone“ has seen … I’d forgotten that it also marked the debut of Gaby Hoffmann, in what would prove ultimately to be one of her biggest parts. Even the fact that this is technically a sports movie shouldn’t have deterred me from watching it so long.

Anyway, as to the sports part – I seem to recall a lot of those “what’s the best sports movie?” type polls listing this high if not at the top, in some cases exactly because it’s not all about the sport (Jerry Maguire is the same). There’s a weird moment where the screenwriter seems to make a case for it being so, when Liotta I think talks about it being all about the game, that baseball is America etc (ah, thank you IMDb: it’s James Earl Jones who says, “The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time.”); but it doesn’t really work and the movie is best as a metaphor for a lot of things rather than specifically America “learning to think for itself again”.

Mostly, though, to my pleasant surprise, I found it one of the funniest movies I’ve seen – I laugh too little sometimes in movies but this one really tickled my funny bone the right way. I love Amy Madigan’s reaction to her husband basically going crazy, lol, it’s so atypical of this kind of story. There’s a corny scene where she basically tells him, “go with it if it’s what you really feel you need to do,” etc, but after that, her face is just a wonder as she takes all the strange goings on with this, “sure that makes sense” bemusement. I love when she turns a whole community meeting around to being against censorship early on in the movie, rushing out into the hallway energised giggling, “It’s like the Sixties again!” which connects to a moment with the similarly exuberant James Earl Jones, when he first meets Costner and says with mock enthusiasm, “You’re from the Sixties!” then proceeds to chase him out the room with an ancient bug sprayer yelling, “Go back where you came from!” LOL.

If there’s one moment it really falls down it’s the moment where Hoffmann gets caught in a tussle between Costner and his brother-in-law and is literally dropped off the back of the bleachers, lol. It shouldn’t be funny, but frankly it is, and it’s such an awful set-up for the plot-point that follows that it threatens to magnify and highlight all the other contrivances of the screenplay that would otherwise be completely excusable.

Overall, however, it’s as wonderful as I’d heard; moreso, in fact, for the humour. It bears that rare wonder, a James Horner score that doesn’t sound like a James Horner score, Hoffmann is adorable, and James Earl Jones and Amy Madigan are simply priceless.