 Starring: Al Pacino, Cameron Diaz, Jamie Foxx, James Woods
Director: Oliver Stone
Year Of Release: 1989
Plot: Tony D’Amato is the long-time coach of the Miami Sharks American Football team, who’s having to deal with the fact that after the death of the club’s owner, his hard-nosed daughter has taken over, and she has different ideas about how things should be run. He also has problems with his aging quarterback, who’s trying to play through numerous injuries, which leads to the arrogant young Willie Beaman getting a chance in the spotlight. |
Ow, my head hurts. I’m not a major sports fan and I only own Any Given Sunday because it’s part of an Oliver Stone box set that I’ve got. As a result it’s a bit difficult for me to get really involved in giant men running around and getting so passionate about a sport I barely understand. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a bad film, but it’s not really for me. The real problem though is that unless it’s got you on the edge of your seat, Any Given Sunday is a bit of an assault on the senses.
Any Given Sunday was made at the end of Oliver Stone’s attention-deficit-disorder period, which lasted roughly from 1991’s The Doors up to the 1999 American football movie. It’s marked by ridiculously fast-cut editing, use of multiple different film stocks, hand-held cameras and plots that jump from subject to subject at breakneck speed. It worked quite well with films such as Natural Born Killers and JFK, but he took it to the extreme with Any Given Sunday.
Just to give you some idea, the average film has between 600 and 1,000 cuts between shots. Any Given Sunday has over 3,000, which means the average shot is only three seconds long. Just think about that, as it means that for 150 minutes, you’re being given something new to look at every three seconds. It’s almost like strobe editing rather than filmmaking.
However it’s not just the editing that makes Any Given Sunday a rather nauseating experience. Stone uses a constantly moving, handheld camera, meaning that the endless brief shots are rather shaky and flashing all over the place. Stone even likes to film conversations like you’re eavesdropping, by placing the camera relatively far away and then zooming in, which not only exaggerates the camera shake, but also tends to flatten the image, making it feel much more ‘in your face’ than it would normally.
The scenes on the football pitch are literally filmed like war scenes, everyone talks about twice as fast as people do in normal life, and there’s split-screens, images within images, cross-cutting between scenes and an awful lot of shouting. It really is as much a barrage as a movie.
It’s innovative filmmaking, but there’s little doubt that it’s difficult not to feel that Oliver Stone could have done with calming down a little. While watching Any Given Sunday, I couldn’t help but think that the film is almost what I imagine being a paranoid schizophrenic is like (not being schizophrenic, of course I don’t really know, but I can imagine), where everything is manic, overblown, and it’s impossible to maintain concentration for more than a few seconds. As a result you’re constantly leaping in and focussing on something briefly and intensely, with everything uncomfortably close, until you zoom off somewhere else.
Stone is trying to throw the viewer into the world of modern day gladiators, but all these overblown techniques are exhausting and rather like having someone standing right in front of your face and screaming at you for two and a half hours.
It would seem that Oliver Stone got his Ritalin after Any Given Sunday, as he went off and directed documentaries about Fidel Castro and the Middle East conflict for a few years, which seems to have allowed him to get much of the intensity and paranoia out of his system.
Since his return to fiction filmmaking with Alexander, World Trade Center and W., there’s been a more lethargic, traditional feel to the films. The editing is still fast, but it isn’t stroboscopic, and while the subjects he tackles are still potentially incendiary, his treatment of them seems safe and far from the boundary pushing that’s marked his earlier movies (in fact each of his last three films have been controversial before anyone’s seen them, while nobody caresd after the first screening).
They say there’s a fine line between madness and genius, and during the 90s Oliver Stone certainly flirted between those with his films, until we got to Any Given Sunday, where things almost hit total paranoid insanity. Now he’s more sedate, as if his films are on calming drugs. However without that edge-of-madness feel, there’s little doubt his movies have lost something. It really does seem that with Oliver Stone there’s no happy medium. You can have paranoid, frantic and somewhat angry, or you can have somewhat staid and as if there’s something missing from his films.
While Any Given Sunday may have gone too far, I’d still prefer to have the old Oliver Stone, just in case we get another Platoon or JFK, rather than the blunted one we seem to have now. Maybe it's time to get Oliver Stone off the Ritalin.
TIM ISAAC
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