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I am married to a man who gets choked up when he sees highlights of the Denver Broncos first Super Bowl victory. I am also friends with a woman who calls all team sports "Stupid Ball." Since I tend to side with my girlfriend, I was not expecting much when my husband and I joined another couple to see Any Given Sunday. Not only is it a football film, but it is a football film directed by Oliver Stone, who enjoys exposing the dark underbelly of American culture. Indeed, Any Given Sunday showed more under the bellies of players in the locker room than I cared to see, and wore me out with its incessant vulgarity and profanity. I'd much rather sit at home reading T. S. Eliot. Then, suddenly, I realized I was watching T. S. Eliot. In a football movie.
Any Given Sunday is a tour de force dramatization of Eliot's classic essay, "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1917), still required reading in literature classes across the country. Though I do not suggest Stone has been reading T. S. Eliot lately, I am going to argue that Any Given Sunday not only illustrates Eliot's thesis but also provides an allegory for the contemporary tension between supporters and detractors of the "postmodern turn."
The film focuses upon Tony (Al Pacino), the aging coach of a professional football team, who has sacrificed marriage and family to his passion for the game. When his first and second string quarterbacks are injured in the same quarter, Tony must put in the third-string Willie (Jamie Foxx), who disregards his coach's advice about time-proven strategies, playing, instead, according to the inspiration of the moment. Willie antagonizes the entire team as he makes his maverick moves, often getting into fights with his fellow players; however, for the first time in several years, the team is winning, attendance is up, and money is pouring in. While it is obvious which character represents "tradition" and which one "individual talent," the film disseminates the tension among multiple voices and images, implying that the dialectic between the traditional values of the community (the "team") and the autonomy of the individual fills more fields than the one where football is played.
Take the field of medicine, for example. We see a young doctor (Matthew Modine) whose concern for the individualized medical needs of the players runs counter to the values of an older team doctor (James Woods), who will sacrifice the health of one player for the sake of winning. Their strained relationship parallels that between the team owner, Christina (Cameron Diaz), and her mother (Ann-Margret). The latter, who tsk-tsks at her daughter's foul tongue, has followed the traditional female role as unemployed spouse and showy appendage to a power-broker husband, while her daughter displays gutsy, hardened self-reliance, making choices that are unusual in comparison not only to the actions of other beautiful women in the film but also to the precedents set by her more traditional father, now dead. "That woman," proclaims the aging football commissioner, "would eat her own children."
The differing perspectives of age and youth appear in a scene between Tony's oldish assistant coach and one of the hotdog linemen, both acted by former football stars. Jim Brown, who plays the coach, is famous in real life for quitting the game at the peak of his career, not wanting to destroy his body for the sake of more money. Oliver Stone, then, has Brown give his own real-life advice to a player in the film (Lawrence Taylor), who, despite his potentially fatal injuries, wants to stay in the game for the million-dollar bonus it will provide. This tends to be the pattern throughout the film: older characters are willing to sacrifice everything for the sake of the team, while the younger ones choose to sacrifice everything for individual glory and money. When the younger doctor questions the ailing lineman about his "balance," Taylor retorts that he needs to balance his checkbook.
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