Twenty-five years in the lives of the one-time "Gray Ghost" in the backfield of the LSU Sugar Bowl champs of 1955-56 and the same-time "Magnolia Queen," who subsequently married. Because the story is based on a novel by the eminent sportswriter Frank Deford, we might have hoped for a greater-than-usual degree of authenticity in the sports action, and we certainly get it in some of the occupational jargon ("jock-sniffer," and so forth). However, the game-winning play of the '56 Sugar Bowl evidences no solider a base of reality than the daydreams of the average nine-year-old. And this, really, is no more ridiculous than the precociously "mature" moment of melancholy precognition which the hero immediately goes into, with the cheers of the crowd still ringing in his ears. Nor is it more ridiculous than the misty wedding night that immediately follows that, to the strains of Nat "King" Cole's "When I Fall in Love." Still, the sports action in the hero's professional afterlife -- with the lowly Washington Redskins -- tends to keep its feet more on the ground, if also to rub our faces into it, and there is enough truth in the assembled truisms about the Aging Athlete so that the movie can serve very well as a sounding board for any sports fan. It takes a good long while, though, just for the storyline to catch up to the evident ages of the principal actors, and the most effective work by any of these comes when Dennis Quaid patently plays older than his real age, wider than his normal waistline, and deeper than his natural vocal pitch: i.e., a middle-aged boozer. Jessica Lange once again has hoped to pass off a Southern accent as a substitute for a character portrait. And for his part, Timothy Hutton, as the hero's highbrow cousin who starts off like someone out of Dobie Gillis and ends up in a sort of Dixieland Our Town, goes through half-a-dozen different hairstyles while Quaid -- highly symbolically, to be sure -- sticks with just one, a military crewcut. The entire ensemble conducts itself with a nakedness of emotion that makes you want to throw it a towel. Or, to take a figure of speech from another sport, throw in a towel. Directed by Taylor Hackford. (1988) — Duncan Shepherd
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