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When it comes to the subject of community, David E. Kelley--the prolific writer-producer behind television's
The Practice and
Ally McBeal--falls somewhere on a continuum between directors Howard Hawks and Robert Benton. While Hawks's professional characters are bound by a knowledge of how to do what they do even if they don't know why, Benton's people, professional or not, have long ago substituted their own eccentric reasons for that elusive why. Thus we get the kind of in-house, oddball rituals sandwiched between passages of actual work on
Ally, and the affectionately entangled personal and professional ties between small-town folks in Kelley's earlier TV series
Picket Fences.
Kelley's script for Mystery, Alaska (co-authored by Sean O'Byrne) takes that level of eccentricity to a geographical and spiritual extreme. The film revives the hackneyed Rocky formula, setting a lopsided hockey match within a remote, self-contained hamlet where the members of a tiny population all have to wear multiple hats and still keep neighborly ties intact. The story concerns the town's chief source of identity and pride: so-called "Saturday games," in which local men divide into teams and play pond hockey for the locals. When a prodigal son (Hank Azaria) of Mystery shows up with a television network offer to bring the New York Rangers in for a televised match against the homegrown team, the town fathers agree. Coaching falls to the town sheriff, John Biebe (Russell Crowe), an admirable man and a longtime player recently bumped from the team. John, however, doesn't want the job: everyone knows the real coach in those parts is Judge Burns (Burt Reynolds), but he wants no part of it either. All of that changes after a sad tragedy forces everyone to reevaluate their positions and pull together in order to beat the Rangers.
Following the success of Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, Jay Roach proves to be an able director of drama, swift action, and low-key, character-driven comedy not unlike that in Benton's Nobody's Fool. He has to deal with some pure corn at the end, but Roach pulls it off and guides the actors to and through far better moments. --Tom Keogh
Director Jay Roach's follow-up to his latest "Austin Powers" installment begins with a fine, and promising, purity: a skater, alone in the Alaskan wilderness (it's actually Alberta, Canada), moves powerfully along a twisting frozen river. We track him from all angles: shot from high above, followed closer from behind, seen coming at the camera in slow motion. We get closeups of fancy footwork, hear the slash of metal on ice. It's a young man training to play in the Saturday game, which is the best thing that can happen to a hockey player in the tiny town of Mystery. The early scenes succeed as a tantalizing evocation of the love of sport for sport's sake. Russell Crowe is warm and impressive as the town sheriff and team captain, and Burt Reynolds, coiffed like a silver fox, is amusing as the town judge and team coach. Unfortunately, once the plot gets rolling-the New York Rangers are coming to town for a game of pond hockey against the locals-the feel-good sports-movie clichés start clicking into place, and by the end there's no mystery at all. -Ken Marks
Copyright © 2006
The New Yorker
