I stumbled across a very interesting little oddity in 'Draft Day' this past weekend on a movie-streaming app. This is an entry in the Kevin Costner 'sports but not really about sports' movie canon ('Field of Dreams', 'Bull Durham', and 'Tin Cup' are previous entries). Costner's career has been varied of late, but he always seems to warm to this type of material. The 3 aforementioned films are superb in my view.
If you are interested in American Football or Costner himself, this is worth a see. It's still worth taking in if you are not smitten by the sport because you do not need to know anything about it other than that each year the professional teams follow a prescribed procedure for picking rookie players.
The action takes place over the build up to the Draft itself. We see each team manager working in their local club war room, taking their pre-determined (or is it?) turn to select from the aspirant players gathered at a media-laden New York venue.
We see deal and counter-deal struck from these different war-room locations with mixed results. Containing the action to just these limited locations heightens the theatricality of the action - you sense each manager working with their support staff from within their own sweat box. Ivan Reitman (Director - great pedigree!) often uses a split screen to show dialogue between the combatants, again artfully reinforcing the strain under which the protagonists are working.
As a UK soccer fan who has sensed a shift in favour of the players in the tantrums of the like of Yaya (nobody at Manchester City bought me a birthday cake) Toure, the debate over 'Machivellean' soccer agents, and the 'Bosman' ruling, I found the film's representation of the American players as no more than 'pieces of meat' being traded at the local market as quite a surprise.
Costner revels in these sports-related roles. Although not up there with the 3 films already mentioned, for me this is a worthy home-viewing.
I am not sure the sub-plots work so well - for instance, Costner seems uncomfortable at the age gap between himself and his leading lady. However, I enjoyed the discovery of a neat, taut tale of something very American, and a return to something close to form for an actor with whom I have grown up.