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Source:
rec.art.movies.reviews newsgroup
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A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN is a funny, warm movie about a nearly forgotten moment in U.S. professional sports. It is also less than it could have been and backs off from having the kind of impact that Geena Davis' last movie, THELMA AND LOUISE, had. What's here is fine, but it is only the surface of what should be a great story, rich and reverberant beyond the limited significance of the story per se.
Penny Marshall, the director of BIG and AWAKENINGS (as well as JUMPIN' JACK FLASH, but that's a different story), backed off the larger meaning of the story in its latter part, when the story focuses on the relationship of the two sister-players, played by Davis and Lori Petty. The predictable story plays itself out with lots of emotion and schmaltz, like any self-respecting baseball picture, in the Big Game at the end. But up until the story shifted into this phase, Marshall had done a pretty good job of expanding the story to make some telling points about the sexism of the times, about racism (in a brief and memorable scene involving a black woman with a fierce pitching arm and a fiercer face, knowing that two barriers were keeping her out of pro ball), the personal price war exacts, and the bravery and strength of individuals in the face of oppressions of all kinds.
It is, however, the actors that really make LEAGUE the success that is. The secondary parts are filled by some primary talent. Jon Lovitz as the baseball scout steals every one of the few scenes he's in with his dry, tough wit. Megan Cavanaugh as the homely, downtrodden slugger is hilarious and not a little heartbreaking; this is the what the world does to such people, and you have to cheer them when they learn to fight back.
Madonna as "All-the-way" Mae Mordabito is completely charming; it's a made-to-order part, but what makes it and her good is not her "bosoms" (as in "What if my bosoms, you know, fall out?" To which Rosie O'Donnell replies "You think there ain't no man in America what ain't seen your bosoms?") is Mae's friendships first with Doris Murphy (O'Donnell), then with the player she teaches to read with the help of a dirty paperback; it's these friendships that make us take a interest in this ex-taxi dancer.
O'Donnell herself walks away with her scenes, leaving Madonna in the dust. O'Donnell is feisty, fierce, loyal, and full of energy as the third base player.
But, of course, the greatest scene stealer is Geena Davis who towers over the rest of the cast figuratively and literally. The woman who plays the older Dottie, by the way, looks like a very tall version of the Beav's mom, Barbara Billingsley, which is a little unnerving. Davis plays Dottie Hinson, the best player in the All-American Girls Baseball League, the only one who says she does not love baseball. But she's competitive and while she's a player she plays as the game is meant to be played. Davis is strong and straight; she looks right with dirt on her face, she looks right spitting tobacco. She's a believable leader, and her role in redeeming Jimmy Dugan, played by Tom Hanks, is entirely credible. And the scene with her husband (Bill Pullman) is nicely underplayed and breathlessly exciting. It is pleasurable to watch her every scene in this movie.
Lori Petty plays her sister Kit. Kit's the interesting one in terms of having problems to work through. Kit is jealous and feeling under the shadow of her big sister. She may come off as a little petulant, perhaps not entirely sympathetic. And whether she honestly earns her place in the sun at the end in an open question that movie posits without following up on.
Tom Hanks plays a washed up, self-pitying, alcoholic ex-great who is reduced to "managing" the Rockford Peaches. He's a mess and it's great fun to see Tom who has gotten entirely too much mileage out of being cute being very uncute here and still be engaging and very funny. He has a couple of scenes, including one consisting of him holding in his anger, which are well worth the price of your ticket. Hanks as Dugan is a charmer, but it is also a character that is built up and then dropped, much as Cavanaugh and Petty are, all in the interest of going for the laughs and the tears.
There is some sentiment in LEAGUE, scenes that made the tears stream down my face. The ending recreates the inauguration of the Women's Baseball exhibit at Cooperstown, an event that saw the beginnings of the film itself -- Marshall attended the ceremony and interviewed some of the living veterans of the AAGPGL before she decided to go with LEAGUE -- an event, I say, that may charm and move you or make you squirm depending on your tolerance for sentiment. But the older versions of the players are a fine and interesting group of women, and I found their presence refreshing and uplifting.
I recommend A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN to you, recommend it enthusiastically and wholeheartedly. You can even play full price and get your money's worth. It is, I think, the best general-release, Hollywood movie I've seen this summer.
By : Frank Maloney
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Source:
rec.art.movies.reviews newsgroup
Rating:
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At one point in A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN, Dottie Hinson (played by Geena Davis) observes that playing baseball is hard. Veteran ballplayer Jimmy Dugan (played by Tom Hanks) tells her sagely, "If it wasn't hard, everyone would do it. The hard makes it great." I think that must play better to baseball fans than it does to me. Having as I do virtually zero interest in the game itself, I would not play no matter how easy it was for me. Nor do I believe that the game is great or that its hardness makes it great. The presence of baseball will not make a film very good in itself. For a baseball film actually to be good it has to rely not on good baseball content or the belief that playing baseball is somehow a noble profession. That is why I like THE NATURAL and FIELD OF DREAMS, but THE PRIDE OF THE YANKEES leaves me cold. I think that A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN really requires of the viewer a belief that there was something noble in women playing baseball and keeping the sport alive while most of the men players were fighting in World War II. For me that is a difficult leap of faith to make and you can weight this review accordingly.
A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN is, I suspect, almost pure fiction vaguely inspired by real events as was director Penny Marshall's previous film, AWAKENINGS. Undoubtedly some of the background detail is accurate, but most of the drama is probably made up of the whole cloth. The story tells how Hinson and her sister Kit Keller (played by Lori Petty) are recruited by a hilariously rude and obnoxious scout (played by Jon Lovitz). Sixty-four women are chosen to field the four teams of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. Kit is more anxious to play than is her older sister, but Dottie is a natural. Not that anyone seems to care. Their alcoholic team manager, Dugan, introduces himself to his team by shuffling drunkenly to the locker room urinal, using it, and shuffling back out. During the games, he shows his commitment to the team by sleeping, scratching his crotch, or practicing what appears to be a regimen of losing ten pounds a week by spitting. Hanks takes to this role as if his view of baseball players mirrors my own. League President Ira Lowenstein (played by David Strathairn) at first is anxious only to be certain that the skirts on the uniforms are short enough to attract audience interest. The news media seems even less interested, editorializing against the "masculinization of women" and then making amused and patronizing newsreels about the women's league.
The script is by Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel and is something of a comedown for the team, who wrote PARENTHOOD and CITY SLICKERS. Much in the plot is incredibly predictable and overly cliched. A word that is overused to describe a film of this sort is "manipulative." Actually, a film should be manipulative, and Ganz and Mandel have done it well in the past. Here it is often done well, but other times done too obviously. The last ten minutes of the film are maudlin and drag. They could and should have been cut to two minutes. The script comes perilously close to making fun of the awkward, plain, and shy Marla (played by Megan Cavanaugh). While some of the male characters redeem themselves later in the film, they almost universally are insensitive jerks when we first meet them.
That brings me to the issue of hypocrisy in this superficially feminist film. The order of billing is Hanks, Davis, Madonna (as a stereotypical loose woman), and Petty. Based on contribution, the order should have been Davis, Petty, Hanks, and Madonna. Top billing for Hanks is absurd; he just did not do more than Davis or Petty. The locker room scenes are G-ratable in the first half of the film, then suddenly turn "peek-a-boo" in the second half of the film.
The score by Hans Zimmer deserves some credit, occasionally having some of the mythic feel of Randy Newman's score for THE NATURAL. However, it mixes in rock, which seems out of place in a film mostly about the 1940s. I would like to call some attention to David Strathairn as Lowenstein. He plays quiet and usually likable characters of integrity. He played a policeman sympathetic to the strikers in MATEWAN and a commander very worried for the safety of his men in MEMPHIS BELLE. He reminds me a lot of a latter-day Henry Fonda. I have never seen him in a bad film, which indicates either that he is intelligent enough to select only better scripts or that his acting has qualities that appeal only to better filmmakers.
One final nice touch: the script calls for us to see most of the main characters as they look almost fifty years later. Normally this would be done with a makeup effect. These makeup effects are rarely done believably and the results are almost always at least suspect. Marshall went to the effort of finding look-alike actors of approximately correct ages, then had the younger actors dub the voices. The effect is reasonably convincing.
Considerable money and effort was lavished on this production, but problems in the script diminish the effort to a +1 on the -4 to +4 scale.
By : Mark R. Leeper
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