Play It to the Bone

(Ron Shelton, USA, 1999)

In the film distribution and exhibition business, the end of the year (in Australia, at least) is known as the Silly Season. Movies enter and exit the cinema theatres at a dizzying rate: small films, films that didn’t do too well in America, difficult films that are deemed hard to sell, and films pegged for almost immediate video shop release.

No one should ever assume that these ephemeral offerings are necessarily awful, just because they do not receive massive promotion.

Yes, some of these Silly Season movies are pretty bad. But others that get the quickie treatment are rather curious – sometimes unsung gems, sometimes just plain weird. A true lover of movies has to stay alert to catch them, because Silly Season is usually the only, fleeting chance we’ll ever get to see them on the big cinema screen – for which, after all, they were originally designed.

I found myself pondering a strange movie of this kind, Play it to the Bone. It’s a boxing story that features Antonio Banderas and Woody Harrelson – so it’s got some star power, at least. And it’s written and directed by Ron Shelton, who has built a unique and quite respected career almost solely from devising films about sport (Bull Durham [1988], White Men Can’t Jump [1992], Tin Cup [1996]), which was once his own profession.

Shelton blends a measure of physical authenticity (games absorb comparatively long stretches of screen time) with a character-driven approach to the drama of male competition. Outside the ring or off the field, it is the battle of the sexes that most interests him.

His movies, though, seem to be a dicey proposition within the Australian market. That’s because they are about very American sports: baseball, basketball, pro golf. Films about intensely American sports, just like movies about intensely American music (African-American music in particular), tend to bypass the mainstream circuit in some other parts of the world. That’s true even of Oliver Stone’s Any Given Sunday (1999) – a football movie which I thought was generally underrated by critics – or the poignant Sam Raimi/Kevin Costner baseball chronicle, For Love of the Game (1999), also unfairly overlooked.

The sports genre is in disarray these days. People tend to think of such films as either completely clichéd, rah-rah, feel-good, victory-against-all-odds films; or the total reverse of that: anti-sport films, like the best and most corrosive example, Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull (1980) – which doesn’t let us cheer for anyone, and only shows us unedifying, ugly little fragments of action inside the boxing ring.

Shelton has his very own take on the sports movie formula. He does like to show sporting action: in minute detail, and at great length, so you can get the full sense of the rounds of a game, the ebbs and flows of its competitive struggle. Play It to the Bone builds to a specific fight between Cesar (Banderas) and Vince (Harrelson) that seems to go on for eternity – but that’s the eternity of slow-motion, fine-grain, sports-play sensation, which Shelton wants you to experience.

That fight is the only fight in the film. For perhaps two thirds of the movie – it can seem endless – we are somewhere else altogether: on the open road, in a car with the top down, taking the scenic route to the crooked, slimy, boxing scene in Vegas. Cesar and Vince are friends who have been given a sudden opportunity to return to the limelight of the ring – but only if they fight each other.

It’s not fantastic cinema, by any means, but it certainly is curious. That’s because Shelton is also into the interpersonal underpinning of sport (as was Robert Towne in his wonderful Personal Best [1982]), the psychological states and emotional relationships that feed into and spill out from the game.

So, on the road, we have a triangle that is almost worthy of Noel Coward’s 1932 play Design for Living – since brassy Grace (Lolita Davidovich), at the driver’s wheel, is the ex-lover of both men. And also since the macho Cesar, as Vince learns to his horror, has in fact been experimenting with gayness for a while – just to see whether it gives his boxing an edge! (He was beaten, you see, in a major fight by a gay opponent.) Vince, meanwhile, has gone queer in a different sort of way: he has frequent visions of Jesus Christ.

In a rather desperate attempt to spice up this three-way dynamic, Shelton introduces Lucy Liu in a terribly demeaning role as Lia, a stealing, whoring, heartless hitchhiker. She has no more depth than Hank (Robert Wagner), the scheming entrepreneur who awaits the trio at the end of the line.

Finally, the fight starts. With his commitment to character, Shelton emphasises not so much the blood and the blows as the strange apparitions Cesar and Vince experience (for some obscure reason, everyone they look at appears nude) in between pummeling each other senseless. Grace, on the sidelines, cheers them both equally – because the whole story rests on the fairly uninteresting question of her true feelings for one guy or the other.

Shelton does not stretch himself as a director here. His work is usually well-crafted, but Play It to the Bone is fairly blandly executed. The film seems especially desperate to impress and amuse when it stoops to a barrage of meaningless, ringside celebrity cameos involving everyone from Kevin Costner to Drew Carey.

At its most intriguing, the story explores the ambiguities of intense male bonding, the difficulties of friendship between women and men, and the vagaries of polymorphous desire. Shelton, as he often does, throws more up in the air than he can successfully or gracefully juggle. But Play It to the Bone is, all the same, a modest film worth catching.

MORE Shelton: Hollywood Homicide

© Adrian Martin October 2000