Draft Day (***1/4)

There’ve been all kind of sports films about all kinds of sports, a few of them featuring Kevin Costner. Most have been about players and coaches, but more recently have come those whose focus is what might be called the sports-industrial complex. Jerry Maguire was about an agent; Trouble with the Curve was about a scout, and Moneyball, like this film, was about a general manager. Costner plays Sonny Weaver, the GM of football’s Cleveland Browns, and the entire film unfolds in the course of one day. Featuring virtually no on-field action, it may appeal to fans of game theory as much as sports fans.

Like the real Browns, the ones in the movie are a struggling team with a new coach (Denis Leary). Weaver is under pressure from the owner (Frank Langella) to make a deal that will excite the good folks of Cleveland, where, as his boss puts it, there are no hot babes on roller skates, so the citizens have only the sports teams to give them hope. So when Weaver gets a chance to trade for the number one draft pick, and thus draft the number one college quarterback, it’s a tempting offer. But this will mean antagonizing his coach, giving up future draft picks, and trusting that the quarterback in question will live up to his promise.

In the end, I’m not sure I believed what he ends up doing, but what the film gets right is the uncertainty. That is, Weaver acknowledges that he is only guessing, that no one can know which players will fulfill their early promise and which ones will flame out. This seems like an obvious truth, but so many sports films are about myth-making, with events seeming foreordained, or characters seeming to have magical abilities, as in Trouble with the Curve. Screenwriters Rajiv Joseph and Scott Rothman keep the focus on character and suspense. Director Ivan Reitman (Ghostbusters, No Strings Attached) fills the screen with SportsCenter-style graphics, even using frequent split screens, but still keeps the drama on a human level. Paralleling Jerry Maguire, Weaver also has a tentative relationship with a coworker (Jennifer Garner), though this too is portrayed with a low-key realism. And so the film will appeal to those who like stories of people, not just sports.

IMDb link

viewed 1/18/14 7:00 pm at Ritz 5 [PFS screening] and posted