Movie: Game 6

"People are dependable! Life is good!"

At the very least, Game 6's scene of Red Sox fan Nick Rogan (Michael Keaton) watching the final, fateful half-inning of his beloved team's historic collapse in the 1986 World Series is worth the price of admission. Though it's been well documented thousands of times by thousands of New England masochists (But really, is there any other kind of New Englander?) and the outcome is inevitable nearly 20 years after the fact, watching Rogan's pitch-by-pitch reaction on screen -- his manic swings of anxiety and relief and elation, to the final, it-all-comes-crashing-down horror -- during that infamous, eternally bloody Caravaggio of chokes that now hangs in The Museum of All Time Chokes, is truly a viscerally excruciating experience for any baseball-loving moviegoer. I squirmed uncomfortably in my seat the entire time, loving every second of it.

I was elated when the Parkway Theater screened this movie, not only because it's an intelligent, funny flick about art and baseball and, well, life in general, but because Don DeLillo, one of my all time favorite authors, wrote the screenplay. And it has his fingerprints all over it. The story structure is borrowed from his latest novel, Cosmopolis (Or more accurately, it's the other way around. Apparently DeLillo wrote the screenplay years ago.) -- a tale about a man who spends a large part of a single day in the back of a car (This time it's cabs instead of a limo.), preoccupied with getting a haircut. It's just that this day happens to be both opening night of Nick Rogan's new play and Game 6 of the 1986 World Series.

Anyway, Nick ultimately ditches his play to watch the historic game in a bar, and a lot of things happen in between. It's not a perfect movie -- there's too much of that overbearing PORTENTOUS WEIGHT OF HISTORY smack that DeLillo likes to peddle in his work -- but, like all of DeLillo's books, the movie has that succession of pitch perfect moments, characters and phrases that steadily accumulate to forgive any flaws the work of art as a whole possesses. And if half of all American movies had a mite of the moxie and magic that this one has, we wouldn't be wondering why so many movies suck.