Coaching Failure

By R.S.

Coaching Failure THAT CHAMPIONSHIP SEASON Directed and Written by Jason Miller

Sometimes it is a mistake to get too close to a play. On the stage, That Championship Season worked partly because there are no close-ups in the theater, partly because of the pleasure provided by the interaction of good performers working their way down court, passing some pretty fast and artful dialogue around between them. But in adapting his Pulitzer-prizewinning play about a high school basketball team's 24th reunion with the coach under whom it won the state title, Jason Miller is fouled by the imperatives of the film medium. The intimacy of the tight shot tends to expose the characters' sad life stories, since the big win is a tissue of cliches. Miller's busy direction keeps isolating each player, breaking up the dazzling and distracting team moves he had written for the play. In these circumstances, the crises and revelations of the evening (one teammate is having an affair with another's wife, several are involved in municipal corruption, and, of course, there is the standard drunk, the standard failure and the standard terminal illness to grapple with) appear not as home truths but mere dramatic inventions. Finally a stale, locker-room odor begins to arise from a work that has nothing more on its mind than yet another attack on small-town bourgeois values.

It is not surprising that the most isolated character (Martin Sheen's alcoholic) appears in the best light. His deflating cynicism scores even when it sails in from outside one of Miller's shots, as it sometimes peculiarly does. The coach is played hard by Robert Mitchum, whose wise and cynical presence just does not suit a man living on nostalgia and dead ideas. The rest of the solid cast includes Bruce Bern, Stacy Keach and Paul Sorvino, who have their moments. But these never add up to persuasive performances.

--R.S.

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