Stone: Any Given Sunday (1999)

Any Given Sunday aspires to be the NFL film par excellence, and it pretty much succeeds. An ensemble drama revolving around the ill-fated Miami Sharks, it’s stadium cinema, a positively gladiatorial experience that aims to give you an even more visceral experience than being there, or watching it on television, as Stone shoots everything with an overembodied, handheld frenzy that’s actually quite prescient of the way most football codes would come to be shot and televised over the next decade. For all the narrative machinations and ensemble charisma, great swathes of it depict the Sharks doing what they do best – at over two and a half hours, there’s almost an entire football game in here – building a propulsive momentum that quickly exceeds the film, and makes you wonder why this wasn’t picked up as a television pilot instead of Friday Night Lights. If it occasionally – or continually – feels like an advertisement for the NFL, then it’s only because, like the NFL itself, it’s continually searching for some kind of camera commensurate to a sport that subsists on such intense, visceral and fleeting moments of contact, a sport that seems to saturate every camera and media platform before it has a chance to capture it. At times, it feels as if the only people who can really, truly watch NFL are the players themselves – and perhaps the coaches, who have to be inside every player – as Stone continually searches for a way to put us right there in the middle of the huddle, which quickly starts to feel like the most mysterious, hallowed sightline on the entire field. To that end, he slams and crunches his shots together, collapses editing into tackling, until the whole film pretty much feels like it’s shot on the field, just as every encounter is on the verge of coalescing into a scrimmage, and every conversation can’t help but feel viscerally, hyperbolically tactical. Light years away from the mobile chess game NFL can sometimes appear to be to an outsider, this is football shot as porn, starting in fourth quarter and never letting up, which can make it quite hard to tell exactly who’s giving and who’s receiving all the insane testosterone flying around, as well as occasionally moving it more towards an extended music video or battle sequence than a fully-fledged film, a lowbrow companion to Saving Private Ryan that seems as determined to blur the line between actors and real footballers as Spielberg did actors and real soldiers. Pumped and preened by its relentless, exhausting bombardment of enjoyment, it’s quite a strange experience to be encouraged to celebrate such a Republican style of football by the self-styled Democrat of American cinema. You can only assume that, as in so many of his war dramas, Stone believes the only way out is through, as he quivers with pleasure amongst the herd mentality that so many of his other films seem to critique and condemn.