BANG THE DRUM SLOWLY
Directed by JOHN HANCOCK
Screenplay by MARK HARRIS
Eyes the shady night has shut
Cannot see the record cut,
And silence sounds no worse than cheers
After earth has stopped the ears.
A.E. Housman did not have Bruce Pearson in mind when he wrote "To an Athlete Dying Young." Pearson, a third-string catcher for the New York Mammoths, is impossible to cast in the heroic Grecian mode. He is a Georgia backwoodsman who can't get the hang of spitting his tobacco accurately, let alone of making his teammates respect or even like him very much. His only distinction is that he has been prematurely touched by mortality, in the form of Hodgkin's disease.
Nobody would write a poem about Henry Wiggen, either. But they do write magazine stories about him, press lucrative endorsement offers on him, ask him to appear on the talk shows. Wiggen is to the fictional Mammoths what Tom Seaver is to the real-life Mets—an ace pitcher with all the right media moves who spends much of his time peddling insurance policies indiscriminately to teammates and opponents alike. The only quirk in his character is his friendship with simple old Bruce.
Wiggen (Michael Moriarty), realizing that a marginal player like Pearson (Robert de Niro) will be released if management gets wind of his illness, ends a spring-training holdout by accepting less money than he is worth—if the owners will agree not to cut Bruce. His efforts to keep Bruce's secret from shrewd Skipper Dutch Schnell (Vincent Gardenia), to get the rest of the club to quit ragging a man they don't know is dying, and to encourage Bruce to play above his half-empty head, form the substance of a funny, gentle and honestly sentimental movie that is easily one of the best of the year in any category, and very possibly the best movie about sport ever made in this country.
Director Hancock and Writer Harris (adapting his own fine novel), have great, knowledgeable fun with the game, getting in their licks at greedy owners, new-breed ballplayers who practice their pop songs right in the locker room, and old-breed managers and coaches who fail to understand that the game is merely a metaphor for life, not life itself.
But the genius of the movie lies in its introduction of the one subject that superbly conditioned young men rarely think about: death. Their efforts to come to grips with it, to handle it nonchalantly, as if it were an easy popup, are shy, deeply touching and completely winning. De Niro's doomed bumpkin is wonderfully exasperating, one of the most unsympathetic characters ever to win an audience's sympathy. Moriarty's Wiggen captures a young celebrity in the moment just before his public persona has iced over his humanity. Gardenia's manager is a perfect study in confusion—the baseball man floundering in existential depths.