Baseball and the Movies : Game 6

The camera moves along a rooftop patio overlooking the East River.  The sun is just rising, casting an optimistic glow on a gray New York City morning.  A man, dressed neatly in ironed slacks and shirt sits in a chair, fighting the wind to read the newspaper, drinking a cup of coffee.  He stands and walks to the railing.  He scans the river, the bridge extending across, the rotting cityscape of the luxury elite.  He looks down on the city and says to himself, "This Could Be It".  The movie cuts to a tracking shot.  The centerfield gate to Shea Stadium opens, and we move across the green outfield grass toward homeplate.  Thirteen hours until game time, we are told.

And so begins Game 6 (2005), one of the finest of all baseball related movies that seemingly no one has seen.  As a baseball fan and as a movie fan, one often comes across various lists cataloguing the best baseball movies, and I have yet to see this little gem of a movie mentioned.  Probably because it was buried rather than properly released, despite the recent explosion of Red Sox Nation.  And perhaps because there is no actual baseball played in the movie.  The events of the game unfold on television, as so many of us have grown accustomed to ingesting the game, and in the hearts and minds of the characters.

"Is there a medication you can count on?

Does it prevent history from happening?" 

Michael Keaton is Nicky Rogen, a successful playwright living in New York City and a Red Sox fan.  The movie follows him throughout the entirety of Saturday October 25, 1986.  Nicky Rogen is a talker.  He talks to everybody.  He spends much of the day in taxicabs, waiting in traffic.  He passes time chatting up the various drivers, only to hop out mid-conversation at the site of his daughter or an acquaintance walking along the city sidewalks.  "I used to drive a cab," he tells once of the drivers.  "Twelve hours straight.  I ate as I drove.  Only stopped to pee.  Where do you pee?" he asks.  "Under the Manhattan Bridge," the cabbie replies.  "That's where I peed!" Nicky says.

Nicky Rogen spends the day riding about and talking, waiting and trying to decide whether to attend the premiere of his new play, his most personal yet, or to watch his beloved Red Sox try to clinch their first World Series title since 1918.  He views both opportunities with foreboding doom.  An infamous critic (Robert Downey, Jr.) has descended upon Broadway, intent on destroying the hopes and dreams of the city's thespians.  Assisted by the needling of an old friend, Nicky becomes paranoid and begins to suspect that the critic will be his professional undoing.  And Nicky is a lifelong Red Sox fan and carries the hurt and disappointment that that entails close to his chest.  "It's like having your whole childhood die over and over and over again," he says.  Added to this is the reminder that his wife is seeking the counsel of a "prominent divorce lawyer".  "How prominent?" he asks.  "He has his own submarine."

The movie is a rare delight, one that takes pleasure both in its baseball history and in its words.  There is a lot of talking in this movie, but the language dances between the speakers.  Many of the characters are writers and actors, and they speak as such.  The screenplay was written by novelist Don DeLillo and plays with many of the themes he explores in the novels Underworld and Cosmopolis.  DeLillo indulges in the structure and emotionality of baseball and how they seep into the consciousness of its followers.  How one's personal history entwines with the history of strangers.  And he bemoans the dirty congestion of the Big City and the endless traffic that shepherds people through their lives.  

Nicky Rogen, in spite of a lifetime of disappointment and failure, tries to conjure the belief that "this could be it".  But as history knows, it isn't.

"The planet turns,

the traffic rolls...

a moment in the history of world."

Game 6

Directed by Michael Hoffman

Written by Don DeLillo

Starring: Michael Keaton, Robert Downey, Jr., Catherine O'Hara, Ari Graynor, Griffin Dunne, Bebe Neuwirth  
Music by Yo La Tengo