Thursday, September 16, 1999

 

For Love of the Game starts off a little disorienting.   It opens with the start of what turns out to be the most important day of Billy Chapel's (Kevin Costner’s) life.  But at this point we do not know the characters and don't know the significance of what is going on.  But slowly the big question marks begin to fade away as we start to realize through a series of current events and flashbacks what is happening.  At first I thought the movie had a split personality.  One minute it's a baseball movie, the next minute it's a love story.  But then I came to realize that the  movie's split personality is mirroring Billy Chapel's split personality.  He is not a complex person but rather an individual that has two things in his life that matter to him.  The fact that there are two things that matter to him is not at first clear to him or us and it is his realization that there are two things is a realization that leads to a profound change in his life. The movie does a good job of immersing even us non sports fans into the drama of the game. So much so that in the second half of the movie I was on the edge of my seat with anticipation of each pitch and each play and really cared about the outcome of the game being played. In fact by the end of the movie even I had come to love the game.

 

 

 

Stephen Van Lydegraf