Baseball is Life, Life is Good

Film Review and Commentary on ‘Game 6’

Directed by Michael Hoffman
Written by Don DeLillo
Starring Michael Keaton and Robert Downy Jr.

Don DeLillo hits a solid double with his first foray into screenplay writing with ‘Game 6’, starring Michael Keaton and Robert Downy Jr. The film is centered around game 6 of the 1986 World Series between the New York Met’s and the Boston Red Sox when first baseman Bill Buckner let the ball through his legs on what should have been a routine final out and the Met’s scored the go ahead run that lead them to win the series.

Robert Downy Jr. plays a reclusive and irreverent costume-wearing Broadway theatre critique, making or breaking a writers career with the drop of his pen and just one scathing review. “I tell the truth and the truth is usually painful,” he says, adding a subtle comedic genius to his role as usual.

Keaton plays a successful New York playwright whose wife is seeing ‘a prominent divorce lawyer’ and can’t talk to his angst-ridden daughter about it. Keaton is a devout Red Sox fan forced to lament over the history of his losing team. ‘Winning is easy, its losing that’s hard. There are so many complexities and layers to losing. The Red Sox’s have ways of losing that… that can keep you awake at night.’

I read my first DeLillo novel – White Noise – straight off the farm as a freshman in college English class at San Diego State University. There I also learned about film, my formative cinematic youth, studying ‘History of Cinema’ with Greg Kahn for two film-drenched years, semester after semester. Greg always said ‘cinema is like baseball’ and that we can compare the two when we talk about levels of appreciation and study them beyond the basics. For the first trip to the ball park for someone one has never been before, the first-time experience for the newcomer can be immensely satisfying – the sights, sounds and smells of the stadium, the hotdogs, peanuts and cracker-jacks, the roar of the crowd, the 7th inning stretch, the scale of it all. But for the avid fan, baseball is more than just a game as DeLillo suggests – the squeeze play, the stats, the decision to bring in an ace relief pitcher to close the game as the Red Sox did in the ’86 series game 6.

It is similar with film. For the novice watching a film they can be taken away into a world of fantasy, enjoying the moving images, the characters, the story. But for the serious fan of cinema the appreciation can run much deeper – the subtle nuances of lighting, the layers and layers involved in the film’s production, the use of the musical score, the performance commanded by the actors from the director, the mise-en-scene and how all these elements come together to speak to us beyond shear entertainment.

A true fan of baseball I am not, but fans of DeLillo, baseball and art are in for a treat with ‘Game 6’ as all three are interconnected around opening night of Keaton’s most personal and important work. Instead of attending his own opening night, he ducks out to watch the Red Sox lose again. Easy to pick apart as most other critics have done, DeLillo delivers, not needing to hit a home-run during his first at bat in the majors.