Oliver Stone Got A Lot Wrong In ‘Any Given Sunday,’ But Deserves Credit For Predicting The NFL’s Concussion Crisis

No studio executive today would dare give Oliver Stone a $55 million budget to make a nearly three-hour epic about professional football, but back in 1999, Any Given Sunday made a certain amount of sense (I swear). Stone, even in the late ’90s, still retained the crown as The Guy Whose Movies Are All About America; shortly thereafter, though, the culture changed and Steven Spielberg (probably rightfully) took that job over. After Platoon broke Stone huge in 1986, all of his movies were about some aspect of Capital-A America: The patriotism of protest in Born on the Fourth of July, the countercultural power of music (and Meg Ryan blowjobs) in The Doors, the riveting, still-hypnotic paranoia of JFK, the media lunacy of Natural Born Killers, the Great Man Tearing It All Down of Nixon. It was reasonable that Stone would look at the NFL at the dawn of the century and see it as a metaphor for all that was horrible and wonderful about this country, and it was reasonable that Warner Bros. would greenlight him to do it. But it really must be said that today, 20 years later, both the idea and the end product seem frankly insane.

There a few things, it should be said, that Stone got right with Any Given Sunday. He saw that the future of football was less about old-time football men like Coach Tony D’Amato (Al Pacino, in full barking Pacino mode) and more about wonkish, statistical obsessives like offensive coordinator Nick Crozier (Aaron Eckhart, back when he was just the creep from In the Company of Men), and he saw that head injuries and concussions were going to be a serious problem that would never stop haunting the NFL. This has to be the first movie in which I ever heard “subdural hematoma” in reference to a football game rather than a car crash. The movie gets the Jerry Jones-esque ghastliness of professional football correct, how the NFL represents the worst of the United States: our worst instincts, worst tendencies, and worst excesses.

The problem, of course, is that Oliver Stone knows Vietnam a lot better than he knows football, and watching it today, it’s rather stunning how many things he gets wrong. He, like many filmmakers before him, gets so entranced by the grandeur of shooting all the different angles of a football game – Stone talked when he was making the film how much he admired the artistry of NFL Films – that he forgets to question the sport itself. He ends up swallowing, and then parroting, all of the NFL’s bullshit. The NFL famously didn’t allow Stone and Warner Bros. to use their logos and teams, so we get the Miami Sharks and the Minnesota Americans. But they needn’t have worried. Stone, deep down, is on their side.

Thus, the supposed anarchist Mickey-and-Mallory Oliver Stone ends up revering Coach D’Amato, whose pleas for players to stop being so self-centered and obsessed with money and individual are seen as The Truest Form of Football, Vince Lombardi pseudo-wisdom of When Men Were Men. The film is full of hoary speeches about Teamwork, and Togetherness, to the point that certain sections sound disturbingly like a management seminar at a Raymond James regional conference. Meanwhile, Willie Beamon (played by Jamie Foxx, who, mercifully, took the role when Puffy Combs couldn’t do it) is the cocky star quarterback who needs to be taken down a few pegs, the guy who thinks he’s above the game and needs the Vaunted Coach to be put in his place. In one section, extremely well-played by Foxx, Beamon goes on a long rant about how many white coaches have been bossing black players like him around for decades, all just to prop up the current power structure, and just when you’re about to yell, “yeah, these shit’s decades ahead of its time,” we cut to Beamon preening and rapping and getting scowls from his teammates, and we realize: Oh, Stone thinks Willie’s the bad guy. When the inevitable Big Game arrives, and Willie has his championship moment, it’s because he has learned to embrace Coach D’Amato’s “selfless” principles. You find yourself hoping he loses, flips the coach off and signs a 10 million dollar shoe contract.

Stone seems much more concerned with the visuals and excesses of his movie than its story anyway: Cameron Diaz’s Tough Bitch (she’s called this twice) owner character makes no sense, but Stone appears tickled pink to have her screaming her way through his story anyway. (At one point he has her enter the locker room full of naked athletes and pauses to have her shake the hand of a man with a cartoonishly large penis; you can almost hear the camera snigger. Also: Would love to see the casting sheet for that role, even in 1999!) Stone had the most power he’d ever have in 1999 – after Alexander exploded on him, he would make conventional little make-good, “I can behave!” baubles like World Trade Center, which is in many ways a bad Spielberg’s America impersonation – and he wields it constantly, to little effect. There are alligators in the locker room and lightning flashes in the pouring rain and a player’s eyeball being knocked out on the field and look there’s Charlton Heston for some reason, and none of it means anything but Stone seems to be having a good time, shaking his keys loudly enough that you might mistakenly believe he has something to say.

Any Given Sunday felt daring in 1999, but only because Oliver Stone still felt a little daring back then. Today, we know better. I bet Spielberg would make a better NFL movie today, all told; maybe he could do the movie version of Mark Leibovich’s searing, hilarious new book Big Game. But he probably shouldn’t bother, all told. Oliver Stone enjoyed trying to make a “naughty” NFL movie 20 years ago. But the real thing is, and always has been, much worse.

Will Leitch is a contributing editor at New York Magazine, national correspondent for MLB.com, host of Sports Illustrated’s “The Will Leitch Show” and the founder of Deadspin. Subscribe to his weekly newsletter: tinyletter.com/williamfleitch/

Where to stream Any Given Sunday