DeLillo out of his league in 'Game 6'

Robert Denerstein, Rocky Mountain News

Published April 7, 2006 at midnight

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When Game 6 premiered at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival, it already seemed a little dated. The story, about a Boston Red Sox fan who suffers through the team's legendary sixth World Series game with the Mets, tries to turn rooting for the Red Sox into a form of heroism - tempered, of course, by the inevitable approach of defeat.

It's a good enough idea, but a script by novelist Don DeLillo (Underworld, White Noise) fails to spring to life as it follows its main character (Michael Keaton) through the day when Bill Buckner let a ground ball roll through his legs and the 1986 World Series went sour for the Sox.

Of course, by the time anyone got around to showing this movie, the Red Sox had already won a Series, much to the delight of fans who no longer had to equate their loyalty with a tragic sense of loss.

OK, maybe I'm being too literal, and we all know that baseball has led many a writer to step up to the metaphoric plate, but Game 6 fails to find a convincing niche.

Keaton portrays playwright Nicky Rogan, a man whose life is falling apart. His wife (Catherine O'Hara) has left him. His daughter (Ari Graynor) can't totally conceal her hostility toward him. He has a play opening that very evening and expects that the town's most ruthless critic (Robert Downey Jr.) will tear it to pieces.

Nicky's expected failure seems all the more frustrating because his latest play is his most personal work to date. He's put his soul on display and fears it will be crushed. The movie takes place in New York, which makes Nicky's devotion to the Red Sox more ironic.

The traffic in New York seems as stalled as Nicky's life. At various intervals, he hops into cabs and talks with drivers. Toward the end, he persuades a cabbie (Lillias White) and her grandson to watch the game with him. He opts for baseball in a bar instead of attending his opening.

The movie is at its best when Nicky's character visits his father (Tom Aldredge), a man who has begun to slip into the forgetful clouds of dementia. It's a touching scene in which a son sees his father fading. Keaton, never one to indulge in sentiment, handles it beautifully.

If you're a DeLillo fan, you may leave the theater wishing he'd resisted the siren call of the big screen, where his work can seem like so much literary muscle-flexing.

Among the many intentionally strange touches is a narration provided by a traffic radio reporter named Lone Eagle (David Guion). But for sheer strangeness, nothing beats Downey's portrayal of a paranoid critic with an overinflated ego and a deep mistrust of everyone.

Downey's Steven Schwimmer attends the theater wearing disguises. The vindictive powers of this acid-spewing gatekeeper make grown men tremble. Early on, we learn about Schwimmer from one of Nicky's friends, a failed playwright (Griffin Dunn). By the end, Downey has revealed unexpected depths in Schwimmer, who never attends the theater without packing heat.

Keaton (along with the rest of the cast) does a good job, but the movie - like Nicky's Red Sox - seems doomed to failure, though not in epic or particularly memorable fashion. DeLillo and company have let one go through their legs.

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