Floridian: HBO hits it out of the park

HBO hits it out of the park

By ERIC DEGGANS

It's a baseball movie that isn't really about baseball.

Ostensibly focused on two greats of the game, it's a film that pokes at their faults with a fan's mix of devotion and dedication.

And one more thing. It's a masterpiece.

From the moment Barry Pepper ambles onscreen as New York Yankees right fielder Roger Maris, it's obvious HBO's 61* is a labor of love.

Directed and executive produced by legendary Yankees nut Billy Crystal, it's a film that lingers on details. The expansive look of Yankee Stadium in 1961 (actually, a lovingly revamped Tiger Stadium in Detroit). The pugnacious face of Babe Ruth, immortalized in a memorial at Yankee Stadium's outfield that looks more like a tombstone.

The stoic rectitude of Maris -- in sharp contrast to teammate Mickey Mantle's charismatic, yet destructive taste for parties and good times.

They even slipped in a classic malapropism from catcher Yogi Berra ("Ninety percent of the game is half mental," he tells Maris during batting practice. "Remember that.")

More than a tribute to athletes, 61* is a fan's-eye view of Maris' and Mantle's historic run at Babe Ruth's record of 60 home runs in a single season. (We'll get to the asterisk in a moment.)

Because it's from a fan, there's a tendency here toward hero worship and almost obsessive focus on detail. But because Crystal is an entertainer and a craftsman, it's also an engrossing story about a singular moment in baseball history -- the equivalent of seeing Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire's recent race to break Maris' record happen while both men are on the same team.

"This guy (Mantle) . . . was there 10 years. . . . He was like Elvis, and then James Dean comes to town (in Maris)," said Crystal, 54, speaking to reporters at a January press conference. "But even though there's great baseball and a great look . . . to me, this is about a husband and a father and a family. That's part of why 61* is incredibly powerful, in a different way than you might expect it to be."

Starting with Pat Maris' 1998 trip from her Gainesville home to see Mark McGwire break Maris' record in St. Louis (a heart problem forced her to watch it on TV from a hospital bed), 61* plays out as a flashback in the widow's mind after McGwire hits that fateful run. (And the Florida ties remain: Pat Maris joined more than 30 relatives Wednesday for a private screening of 61* at the Tampa Theatre.)

The movie shines brightest in dramatizing the fallout for Roger Maris, a soft-spoken family man from North Dakota ill prepared for the onslaught of attention his effort would bring.

"When I first read the script, I had nightmares," confided Pepper, who won the role of Maris after Crystal saw him play an intense, religious sharpshooter in Saving Private Ryan. "It was hard not to feel for all that Maris went through that year. He was just a farm boy . . . stuck in the middle of Babe Ruth and Mickey Mantle's legacy."

Indeed, Maris wasn't the sort of player Yankee fans expected to break Ruth's record. That distinction belonged to Mantle, a 10-year veteran of the team with a taste for nightlife and newspaper-ready quips who had become a superstar in New York.

Despite his legend, Crystal -- a friend of Mantle's until the baseball great's 1995 death -- pushed for a more realistic portrait of the centerfielder.

That's what keeps 61* from becoming the kind of movie you can show to the little leaguers. In this film, Mantle swears, womanizes and tells the kind of sex jokes that could air nowhere else on TV but a pay cable channel like HBO.

"It's not easy to sit through, but it's done in great taste and it's a full portrait," Crystal said of the material, which includes a scene where a married Mantle picks up a woman in a bar and gets into a car wreck while driving drunk. "If we candy-coated him, he would have been mad at us."

Danny Mantle, also at the HBO press conference, agreed: "Seeing this movie actually taught me what they were really going through," said Mantle, born in 1960. "I had no idea it was that bad."

In the background, Crystal makes another, subtler point about the state of athletes then and now.

During the movie, Maris' wife, Pat, lives in Kansas City with their children rather than New York City "because we can't afford two households on $38,000." When Maris makes a stop home, deep into beating Ruth's record, a swarm of reporters and fans is waiting at his home. There is no public relations firm or lawyers to help out.

As Mantle struggled with a drinking problem and Maris worried about hate mail so much his hair was falling out, they had little of the support modern athletes enjoy.

Eventually, the two bonded. Maris suggests Mantle room with him and teammate Bob Cerv (Third Watch's Chris Bauer) at an apartment in Queens. In turn, Mantle tries to help Maris deal with life under the media microscope.

"The perception was that they were rivals and that they didn't get along and they were envious and jealous," Crystal said. "Roger was 25 that summer and Mickey was a young 29, an immature 29. So they helped each other in different ways."

Every story about heroes needs villains, and this film has a few.

There's baseball commissioner Ford Frick (Bull's Donald Moffat) -- a former Ruth biographer who decides to place a "distinctive mark" on any home run record achieved after 154 games -- the number of games Ruth took to hit 60 homers.

Maris had eight more games to reach that level, thanks to a league expansion in 1961 that added two teams. It would be 30 years before baseball commissioner Faye Vincent removed Frick's asterisk, six years after Maris' death.

But the real bogeyman here is the press, shown as a voracious, ambitious group that indulged the unique American pastime of building up heroes only to tear them down.

Maris, taciturn and intimidated, couldn't do much right in their eyes -- a dynamic only heightened by a talent for delivering quotes that could be misconstrued.

He tries to explain that players in 1961 have their own difficulties Ruth never faced -- playing night games and flying to the West Coast. Reporters write that he said, "Ruth had it easy." He gets frustrated over a poll showing 80 percent of Yankee fans want Mantle to break Ruth's record. Reporters accused him of hating New York City.

It's a bit that's overplayed at times and typical of Hollywood's often dismissive tone toward journalists in films (at least they cast My Girl co-star Richard Masur as somewhat sympathetic sportswriter Milt Kahn).

But it shows how the media -- most of whom never played the game, Kahn points out -- helped turns fans against Maris, bringing hate mail, threats of kidnapping against his children and an incident in which a Yankees fan threw a chair at him during a game.

Even Ruth's ghost seems to rise up against the ballplayers, exemplified in widow Claire (Renee Taylor), who tells Pat Maris point blank she doesn't want her husband breaking the home run record.

Crystal assembles a crack cast here, including former Brat Packer Anthony Michael Hall as pitcher Whitey Ford and The Insider's Bruce McGill as Yankee manager Ralph Houck.

Pepper and Thomas Jane (Deep Blue Sea) shine as Maris and Mantle -- the physical resemblances alone are uncanny -- a feat made even more impressive considering that Jane never played baseball before signing on to play the talented switch hitter.

"(During training) the first thing he says to (former baseball star and consultant) Reggie Smith is "How do you hold a ball?' " Crystal said, laughing. "I said, "Excuse me. How do you hold a .45 to my head?' "

Nevertheless, his two leads managed to ape the moves of two legendary ballplayers for a movie that digs deep inside their world.

"We wanted to make it so right for the Maris family, the Mantle family, for Roger and for Mickey," said Crystal, who closes the movie with footage of a tow-headed kid watching batting practice in 1961 and a dedication to his father, Jack Crystal, who took him to that game 40 years ago.

"That's the best feeling about this whole thing: that we got it right for them."

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AT A GLANCE: 61* debuts at 9 p.m. Saturday on HBO. Grade: A+. Rating: TV-MA (Mature Audiences).