Filmbook: "Eight Men Out" (1988)

Aiee... Hollywood. It could have been much worse for EIGHT MEN OUT than John Sayles' adaptation, which is remarkably faithful to the book until the last half-hour when it does some truly impressive acrobatics and basically invents its own ending. Maybe it was too faithful up to that point, which would explain why it was so flat.

I guess I shouldn't have been surprised to see some of the characteristics I disliked in Asinof's book exaggerated for the film audience. Buck Weaver isn't just "the All-American boy," he makes impassioned speeches at the drop of a hat! (Including robbing David Strathairn as Eddie Cicotte of a chance to do his own speechifying, and that should be illegal.) Michael Mantell's Abe Attell isn't just a shady character, he needs to narrow his eyes all the time and speak in a creepy Spot-Conlon-from-Brooklyn* monotone. And the whole thing is scored in phony Jazz Age music, just in case we forget that it's The Past. I don't even want to know the direction given to D.B. Sweeney as Shoeless Joe, who plays Jackson as not so much illiterate as prone to prolonged blank stares -- "head injury patient," I guess.

There are some neat moments in this film; I appreciated John Mahoney as Kid Gleason, the Sox manager who can't explain why his team is falling to pieces around him, and Kevin Tighe is precisely slippery as "Sport" Sullivan, one of the gamblers involved in the fix. There's a great (albeit brief) scene with John Anderson as Kenesaw Mountain Landis that I didn't remember from the book. But this movie just doesn't execute the way it should. Sayles' reliance on devices like the "montage of newspaper headlines" and the "little kids with no connection to the plot, but useful receptacles for speechifying" got old. Casting himself as Ring Lardner did little to convince me of his earnestness towards the plot.

Tomorrow: Putting out the fire with gasoline and Jonathan Mahler's LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, THE BRONX IS BURNING.

*"Well I say... that what you say... is what I say." Anyone?