“Game 6” is a sweet exercise by Michael Keaton and others coupled with some spiffy dialog by Don DeLillo and upbeat direction by Michael Hoffman. The film features an engaging combination of theatrical presentation with an almost subliminal “Heart of Darkness” journey that echoes helicopter blades, napalm and dirty weapons from deep in the bowels of Gotham. The story casts a high noon showdown between a playwright who desperately needs a hit, a critic whose toxic reviews reduce established stars to muttering street people and a ball club with a curse.
Michael Keaton plays a Bob Fosse “All That Jazz” character, playwright Nicky Rogan, who is losing the ability to separate fantasy from reality. As in a bad dream he takes the same cross-town taxi back and forth but never reaches his destination. In fact he never even knows his destination. His taxi rides take him to chance meetings with various estranged members of his family: wife, daughter and father, and to his has-been wraith of an ex-actor friend, cut down to a dumpster-diving bag person by the words of critic Steven Schwimmer (Robert Downey Jr.).
Schwimmer lives in a slum tenancy in a semi-abandoned garage in permanent hiding from the society that supports him. As Martin Sheen said in “Apocalypse Now,” “...even the jungle wanted him dead...” In fact, Schwimmer has the Midas touch of death. Everything he sees, he writes about and he kills. The next opening he will review is Rogan’s, the playwright’s self-imposed last chance to justify his existence in light of his destructive and self-centered existence. Rogan’s wife Lillian (Catherine O'Hara) is divorcing him. She has tolerated his transparent and feckless philandering until she has reached the breaking point. When he makes one last, shallow and humiliating effort at confession, screenwriter Don DeLillo digs the disclosure of his paramour as his wife’s gynecologist into Lillian like a born-again Woody Allen. Lillian takes it like a man while Rogan shrinks in his chair like Batman unmasked.
As if all this is not enough, the play’s opening night is also the evening of Game 6 of the 1986 World Series. The Sox have the lead and the momentum and they are set to win over the Mets. Rogan grew up in Boston and has lived every Sox game in his soul since he was old enough to walk. They have not won a series since 1916. There is always something. Failure dogs his team at every turn. No matter how much of a sure thing it is something happens in the end; a fumbled throw, a blister on the heel, a wild pitch at the wrong time. But this time it will be different. He sees the light at the end of the tunnel---a Sox win, a smash opening and Schwimmer cut down with a silver spike of a screenplay, a masterwork that puts Rogan back on top and gives him one last chance to make it all right. A screenplay that gives him one last chance to treat those who loved him with the respect they deserve.
Dead pan voice-over narratives come in over the top of chance asbestos storms as radio personality “Lone Eagle” (David Guion) hovers over a perpetual traffic jam that always keeps Rogan from doing the right thing. Is Schwimmer the cause, or only the symptom? Even the city wants him dead. He has to die. But who, the critic or the playwright? Rogan’s family deserts him and all he has left is a taxi cab mom and her 10 year old kid, and game six of the Series.
An excellent performance by Keaton showing some Shakespearean chops in the context of an unabashedly commercially bastardized sold-out world of artistic endeavor. Robert Downey Jr. knocks out a great, if limited, performance as critic Schwimmer. Ari Graynor plays Rogan’s estranged daughter, the avenging angel of his debased life come back to haunt him. Dreamy, translucent directing by Michael Hoffman brings the great DeLillo screenplay in and out of dream-land with ease. This is an opening you don’t want to miss.
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