KEATON ON HIS GAME
BY LEN SOUSA
Game 6
Film Review
“This could be it,” says playwright Nicky Rogan (Michael Keaton) at the start of “Game 6,” a film written by novelist Don DeLillo. The story centers on that fateful day in Red Sox history—October 25, 1986 (the game six of the title)—when the would-be World Series champions lost their crucial lead to the New York Mets. The Mets went on to the win the pennant that year and secure Boston’s continuing World Series defeat for another 18 years.
However, the same day as game six, Rogan’s new play is set to debut in New York and a scathing theatre reviewer (Robert Downey, Jr.) plans to review the show. Rogan is unaffected until a fellow playwright (Griffin Dunne) blames his failed career and loss of sanity on one of those dreaded reviews. Throw in a lead actor with a brain parasite who can’t remember his lines (Harris Yulin), a wife who has recently met with “a prominent divorce lawyer” (Catherine O’Hara), and Rogan, like his beloved Red Sox, has the odds stacked against him.
Much like a novel, DeLillo’s freshman effort as a script writer (as a novelist he has written 17 books since 1971) is filled with some heavy-handed dialogue that doesn’t always convey itself as naturally as it should on screen. The Red Sox metaphor is laboriously drawn out as Rogan’s favorite team can only come to the brink of winning before inevitably failing: “The Red Sox are always winning—until they lose.” And the addition of a supporting character who tries to show Rogan the way toward positive thinking attempts to soften the film unnecessarily before its final climax.
Keaton, however, plays Rogan’s accepting defeatist to perfection. The role seems tailor-made for the character actor, and his words of wisdom based on Red Sox history give fans much more to consider when watching a season game: “You can analyze a Red Sox game day and night for a month and still uncover really complex layers of feelings—feelings you didn’t even know you were capable of having.” The script has a firm handle on Rogan’s character throughout, and though the main character is also writer, DeLillo claims no autobiography to the story. A supporting cast that includes Bebe Neuwirth and Tom Aldredge add a fuller tangibility to the film’s landscape.
Though the plot eventually leads to a predictable and rather unsatisfying ending (can a Red Sox movie end any other way?), there is still plenty to enjoy in this independent feature. It’s a picture about art and critics, about success and the perceptions of failure, about expectations and actualities. Released two years after the Red Sox 2004 World Series win, the film is overshadowed by the presence of a championship that will one day come. One wonders if DeLillo had this perception in mind when he wrote the screenplay, or if he was writing just another baseball movie. Based on the novels he's written before, it’s safe to bet on the latter.
Unpublished Film Review
