A Day In The Life…-Kevin Costner’s Draft Day

 

DVD Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Draft Day, starring Kevin Costner, Jennifer Garner, 2014

Someone once said that paper will take any subject that is written on it. Apparently the same is true for film except its taking anything projected on it as the subject of this film under review, Draft Day, readily demonstrates. One would think that those who are interested in the draft and draft day, the football draft of former college student-athletes who will replenish the National Football League not the dreaded military draft that men of my generation associate with that word, that the “real” event would produce enough “real” drama to last a whole season. But apparently somebody, and I am not privy to whom, decided that a run through the behind the scene maneuvers by hard-crusted and surly professional football team general managers in additional to the real draft day event had box office appeal.      

Now I will confess straight up that I am not a guy who lives and breathes for NFL draft day ready to don team paraphernalia and whoop it up as the draft selections get called. I don’t particularly have any current interest in which college player plays for which team (although in the past I had an interest in the fate of the Los Angeles Ram when they were in Los Angeles so you can tell it has been a while since I have gone nutty over professional football). I do admit to a current interest in college football standings figuring out weekly my own Top 25 teams (as the recently established play-off system for the national championship becomes more layered that interest may fate as well) although not to the fates of individual players as the turn pro so maybe that is why this film did not grab me.   

Let me tell you about it a little. Frankly it is hard to get worked up about the back room maneuvers behind individual draft selections as the myriad professional football teams scramble to keep themselves in contention, or the reality of draft day since it is skewed toward the low-end teams in the age of parity who will try to get well by savvy selections (aided and abetted by those massive television contracts that get everybody well). Here Sonny (played by Kevin Costner), yes Sonny Weaver, the son of the late legendary Cleveland Browns head coach of the same name who had passed away the week before draft day (by the way having been fired by dear son Sonny at some point to make way for a new coach who had a Super Bowl ring to his credit) and the front office general manager for the Browns needs to make some deals to get the Browns well, get them higher up on the NFL food chain. So Sonny is open to any and all proposals from shifting draft choice positions for future choices, to dumping high contract players in order to keep inside the budget, to “dissing”  certain draftees on draft day (as apparently every general manager in the film seemed to be). All in the spirit of something like the guys who work the floor in the Chicago pork belly and wheat futures markets.         

Sonny by hook or by crook makes some deals that sounded like they would move the Browns up the chain but frankly I was non-plussed by the “drama” of the moves. In any case the screenwriters thoughtfully figured out that the inner workings of draft day would not appeal to a mass audience so they threw in a little off-hand romance between Sonny and his number-cruncher staff member girlfriend and a cameo appearance by his grieving mother to show that work is work but that Sonny was not really a futures market kind of guy after all. Yes, film will take any subject projected on it.