Common Sense Note
Parents need to know that this movie is the furthest thing from nonstop baseball action. It's extremely talky, with the game scenes almost an afterthought. There is lots of salty locker-room language, including references to (possible) homosexuality and adultery and sexually transmitted diseases. The subject of a man dying young isn't tackled religiously. Characters just sadly accept his fate.
Families can talk about the characters' motivations. Why does Wiggen go to such extremes to protect Bruce, when he (according to another character) had no great friendship with his fellow player before the fatal medical diagnosis. Do you think Wiggen's actions show team spirit, or just the opposite? What do you think would have happened if he had told the truth about Pearson in the first place?
Common Sense Review
Reviewed By: Charles Cassady, Jr.
While the video box has a Roger Ebert thumbs-up recommendation calling this "the ultimate baseball movie," it's a foul if you expect BANG THE DRUM SLOWLY to be a lot about action, with home runs on the field and a nail-biting Big Game finale, in the manner of a family-sports frolic like Rookie of the Year. None of that here.
This is a stagy, melancholy drama, filmed plainly against a baseball backdrop. All the important scenes happen off the field, with much verbal poetry made from the game's colorful slang and a lineup of eccentric owners, coaches, managers, girlfriends, retirees, and teammates, to evoke an elegy for an athlete dying young.
Henry Wiggen (Michael Moriarty), a star pitcher on the fictitious New York Mammoths ball club, happens to drive a rookie teammate named Bruce Pearson (a young Robert De Niro, who studied his role by practicing with the Cincinnati Reds) from the doctor's office. Pearson has just gotten a grim diagnosis of terminal Hodgkin's disease. Pearson is an unsophisticated country kid from Georgia, and Wiggen feels moved to become a practical guardian angel to Pearson, even though they weren't really close before.
Since their contracts are up for renewal, Wiggen goes to great lengths to hide Pearson's condition and give him more time to enjoy the sport he loves without the disease interfering. Other players can't fathom the friendship, and blustery team manager Schnell (Vincent Gardenia, who was Oscar-nominated for the role) knows something's going on behind his back, but he can't figure out what. Still, the progress of the illness can't be halted.
The narrative has no strong forward motion, no real villain or menace. Wiggen seems to relish keeping Schnell in the dark for the fun of it, just like the baseball old-timers who play a card game called TEGWAR ("The Exciting Game Without Any Rules") that seems all about just fooling your opponent. There's an idea that the suddenly cozy relationship between Wiggen and Pearson (Schnell even wonders if the two are gay) is a perceived threat to the balance of the team, and Wiggen knows his own athletic career can't last forever either, so he's half-heartedly planning for post-baseball existence by looking into insurance sales. But baseball is his true passion in life. He risks even his own place on the mound to make sure Pearson gets to enjoy as much playing as possible before he dies.
The low-key treatment doesn't really spell out Wiggen's character and background motivations, maybe because he was already an established hero in a series of baseball novels by author Mark Harris. This material was already familiar to audiences. Like the boxing lament Requiem for a Heavyweight, Bang the Drum Slowly had been adapted as a successful broadcast drama in the golden age of television (starring Paul Newman). The movie version managed to incorporate more realistically salty locker-room talk (in this context it never seems gratuitous, and one character even apologizes profusely before using the S-word).
The big-screen feature came along at a time before superstar-athlete salaries (a lot of the dialogue does involve bickering over money), when baseball, especially commemorated in the nonfiction bestseller The Boys of Summer, seemed like one of the last vestiges of American innocence and goodness, after the Vietnam War and the tumultuous 1960s. Maybe that's also why the whole movie has such a wistful, achy-breaky-heart quality to it.
Kids might frankly be bored by all the jabber, though ones who are deeply into sports could take some good pointers here about camaraderie. They would probably also get a lot out of the classic, fact-based football tearjerker Brian's Song.
Rate It!
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Sexual ContentSideways talk about baseball players having prolific love affairs; references to sexually transmitted disease and Playboy magazine. The close friendship between Pearson and Wiggen is misinterpreted (briefly) as homosexuality. |
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Violence |
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LanguageOne F-word, many "dammits," and use of the S-word (one character apologizes profusely before uttering it), and the P-word (for urination). |
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Message |
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Social BehaviorHenry Wiggen puts his friendship with Bruce Pearson ahead of everything else (though we hear from incidental dialogue that this may not always have been the case). The rest of their team is multicultural, and the team owner is female (but not necessarily sympathetic). |
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CommercialismReferences to a handful of popular men's magazines and their advice on dressing and hairstyles. |
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Drug/Alcohol/TobaccoSocial drinking. |
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