Still, We Believe: The Boston Red Sox Movie
Cooper, Rand Richards
S C R E E N Rand Richards Cooper NICE GUYS FINISH LAST 'Still, We Believe: The Boston Red Sox Movie' Europeans experience history itself; a Red Sox fan is an Irishman, a Serb, an Armenian,...
...Can you believe it...
...If they won, I wouldn't know what to do," Angry Bill announces at season's start...
...They always find a new and better way...
...But while glutted with conceptual exCommonweal 2 2 June 18, 2004...
...An infectious esprit emanates from the new players, especially Kevin Millar and his rousing, silly in-vocation (cadged from a country song) to "Cowboy Up...
...imaginative risk seems intrinsically admirable, so it was all the more disappointing when the long-awaited musical Bombay Dreams, a tribute to the over-the-top aesthetic of Indian "Bollywood" movies, turned out—bizarrely—to be a little thin...
...How could this have happened...
...shouted a guy sitting near me in the theater...
...The Sox suffer through a three-and-seven road trip in June, only to rebound with a seven home-run shellacking of the Yankees in the Bronx...
...I watch to see how they're going to blow it...
...Steve, a cheerful firefighter who follows the games from his station, tries to laugh it off...
...Oh no...
...Angry Bill is unfazed by such triumphs...
...The season, however, develops nicely...
...It is hard to really care about the characters in this handsome National Theatre production, directed by David Leveaux and designed by Vicki Mortimer with snazzy visual echoes of the lunar theme (curvy furniture, a disco ball, etc...
...Consider the ex-ample of Grady Little, a serious contender for Manager of the Year, yet fired nonetheless after the loss to the Yankees...
...Behind two games to none, the Sox sweep three in a row to win in a miracle comeback...
...Summer offers some giddy highs...
...Vince Lombardi's dictum about winning—that it isn't everything, it's the only thing—has long been a staple of coaching inspiration in American sports, but only recently has it become the structuring reality of baseball's economy and management...
...and now Red Sox fans abandon themselves to the thrill...
...Boston's Boy Wonder general manager, Theo Epstein, makes key last-minute trades...
...This is our year...
...It's almost an illicit pleasure to listen to his rote invocations of doom, enunciated with a bitter certainty which, we recognize, is both self-punishing and self-protective...
...Though Doyle barely nods at this pre-cursor, and provides no footage of Red Sox teams of yore, Still, We Believe fairly groans with the burdens of history...
...The pieces are falling into place," writes Boston Globe sports columnist Dan Shaughnessy...
...But they don't go down...
...For Red Sox fans it's 1946, 1967, 1975, 1978, and 1986 all over again...
...Hence the necessity of the Red Sox...
...Americans experience sports the way A Commonweal 2 I June 18, 2004 on Boone's extra-innings homer off Tim Wakefield...
...For the first and only time in the film, he smiles...
...And, as the title of Still, We Believe implies, this demands of us not a cessation of faith, but a continuation...
...statistical comparisons across the ages are the lifeblood of its hard-core fans, and changes to its rules (in contrast to foot-ball and basketball) occasion anxiety and harsh resistance...
...a Red Sox fan is an Irishman, a Serb, an Armenian, reciting ancient hurts inflicted by ancient enemies, fomenting a vehemently one-sided view of reality, and rousing the eternal hope of vindication and dominance...
...his wife chimes in...
...One little remarked-on revolution in the game, or perhaps in the culture of the game, has been a sharply diminished tolerance for losing...
...Doyle's eight worshipers find diverse ways of participating in—and fending off—the sacred pain...
...It's only June...
...one star (Trot Nixon) and one super-star (Normar Garciaparra) have yet to play a single inning this season, while last year's league batting champ (Bill Mueller) languishes on the disabled list...
...How could we have let ourselves hope...
...The causes are many, but the bottom line is that we have lost our understanding of losing...
...No one can lose like the Red Sox," " he says...
...dissipates the play's narrative momentum, as does George's dispassionate rapport with his blonde-bombshell wife Dorothy (Essie Davis...
...It is a cathedral of pain and loss...
...Just wait for August and September, when the Sox have a matchless tradition of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory...
...Dan, a twenty-something Boston resident left paraplegic by a swimming accident, draws inspiration for his own rehabilitation in the hope of Red Sox victory...
...Yet night after night the team keeps finding ways to win...
...And if you don't believe that, well, go root for that soulless juggernaut in the Bronx...
...They've won seven out of ten and sit in first place, a half game ahead of that barnstorming assemblage of all-stars, that billionaire's vanity toy, also known as the New York Yankees...
...In an era in which the idea of winning has transfixed America's imagination and imperiled its soul, the Sox remind us that life is a trial: that it raises hopes only to crush them cruelly...
...Tomorrow is gonna be the greatest day in Red Sox history...
...Angry Bill is a case study in spiritual pessimism...
...They're not going to win, but you root for them anyway...
...Stricken, Angry Bill snaps off his TV...
...Don't have your kids watch sports," he says in disgust...
...Angry Bill: "They're gonna go down in four...
...At season's end the Sox hold a wild-card entry into the playoffs...
...asks Harry, a high school coach who has followed the team for five decades...
...It is holy...
...Used to be, you rooted for your home team no matter what...
...Featuring murder, theology, a moon landing, an agnostic archbishop of Canterbury, and a team of philosophy professors who double as gymnasts, Jumpers should by all rights be another prodigal display of Stoppardian wit, like his recent Invention of Love...
...Nowadays, however, when a team languishes, so does attendance, often drastically...
...Come August, if it's close, they'll fold," he predicts...
...It's only going to be the first of many...
...He interviews eight of the Olde Towne Team's faithful, charting their ups and downs over the course of a thrilling and ultimately heartbreaking season—a campaign in which the Red Sox, buoyed by new ownership and the acquisition of some hard-working, no-name players, fought their way to the American League championship series, only to lose in seven games to the Yankees...
...Of course, they don't win...
...I have no nails left," moans Steve the Fireman...
...you went out to the park, whether they were champs or bums...
...Even Angry Bill reveals the fervent hope he has kept locked away...
...You'd have to be ninety-five years old to remember that event, notes one of Doyle's interviewees...
...The club gave Doyle unlimited access, from locker room to owner's box, but what he's really interested in are Boston's fans...
...The Yankees tie the game, then win s I write this, it is the cusp of summer, and the Boston Red Sox are winning...
...Well, a hint might come from another piece of exorbitant whimsy that opened around the same time: a revival of Tom Stoppard's 1972 play Jumpers...
...It isn't pretty...
...I'm totally jaded...
...That would have been unthinkable just a decade ago, but baseball has experienced a radical attenuation of patience, among owners and fans alike...
...The Sox lead despite a daunting array of injuries to key players...
...But Little doesn't take him out...
...shouts a bar owner to the assembled faithful as the Sox head into game seven in the league championship against the Yankees...
...Calm down, my heart...
...Baseball, far more than other professional sports, cherishes continuity...
...The death blow was a home run struck by journey-man infielder Aaron Boone, in a nightmarish echo of another notorious loss to the Yankees a quarter-century earlier: Bucky Dent's season-ending homer against the 1978 Red Sox...
...August passes, and no col-lapse...
...Sure enough, the team loses its opening game, to lowly Tampa Bay, on a ninth inning homer...
...A similar nuts-and-bolts problem mars Bombay Dreams, a musical spicily scored by the Bollywood composer A. R. Rahman, who Philosophical gymnastics <h~Y PHOTO CREDIT: HUGO GLENDINNING S ometimes too much just isn't enough...
...The excel-lent actor Simon Russell Beale waffles on deliciously as the mild-mannered philosopher George, who's toiling over a paper on the existence of God, but the character's windy metaphysics early in Act I ("To ask, 'Is God?' appears to pre-suppose the existence of a deity who, perhaps, isn't...
...that it ends badly...
...But the star among Doyle's subjects is a diehard fan known to Boston-area sports radio listeners as Angry Bill, for his acid denunciations of Red Sox short-comings and serenely mordant predictions of team collapse...
...He has hardened his heart...
...It's killing me," " he says...
...And all partake in the sacrament of Yankee hatred—like Erin and Jessamy, bubbly office workers who travel to a Sox game in Milwaukee, then detour to Chicago and Wrigley Field in hopes of seeing the Yankees lose to the Cubs...
...That was the only conclusion to draw from some of the wild flights of fancy that skidded to a landing on Broadway this spring...
...In short, Jumpers shoots off Stoppardian pyrotechnics without building a sturdy play to catch them in...
...I can't believe it, but I predict they're gonna win...
...In an era when surebet revivals multiply like gerbils and producers frantically hedge their bets by casting celebrities (Ashley Judd in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, anyone...
...As such, the Red Sox constitute an invaluable—and seemingly eternal—spiritual re-source...
...STAGE Celia Wren RECONSTRUCTIONS 'Jumpers,"Bombay Dreams' & 'Assassins' travagance (we might mention the naked woman swinging from a chandelier), Jumpers lacks a few dramaturgical essentials, like suspense and a protagonist whose welfare is in jeopardy...
...That tradition is the subject of Still, We Believe, Paul Doyle's documentary chronicle of the 2003 Red Sox...
...Take him out...
...I've been sick all week...
...By now Red Sox suffering surpasses an individual human life span...
...In the opener against Oak-land, they lose on a squeeze bunt in the twelfth inning...
...Red Sox fans still wince at manager Grady Little's decision not to pull star pitcher Pedro Martinez when he was being hit hard in the eighth inning...
...They can't hurt me anymore...
...You live, you die," reflects Angry Bill, "and the Red Sox are part of how you grow up...
...As every Red Sox fan knows, the team hasn't won the World Series since 1918...
Vol. 131 • June 2004 • No. 12
