A superb actor. The Coach strides through That Championship Season like a colossus, knocking over everything in his path. There is a certain nobility to the Coach, and the greatest challenge for a director in That Championship Season is to make him likeable, in a kind of grandfatherly way, because he is also one of the most racist characters to ever walk the stage.
But just as the coach is the glue that keeps his boys together, his powerful persona squeezes the life out of these thirty-eight year old men. If anything, he appears to have more control over their current lives than he did when he was their mentor on the court.
The Coach still lives in an age, ostensibly but may be closer to the mark, when the white Christian man reigned supreme, and every black was a nigger and every Jew a kike. The great enemies of society, the Coach lectures to his boys on numerous occasions, are the Jews. He would be right at home in Nazi Germany. Inbounds pass to George, the dim-witted mayor of the town.
The Coach, who has moved seamlessly from the basketball court to the political arena, advised George to institutionalize the baby to avoid any embarrassment that might complicate his political career. Sounds like the Coach really is a figure from the Old Testament. George faces re-election, and his opponent is a man named Sharmen, a Jew.
Coach and George are certain that this information will swing the election their way. George owes everything to the Coach. Boredom runs rampant among these men who should be living in the very prime of life. He seeks solace in material objects, but his real passion is women. When she paid a visit to Phil to talk politics, they both made it that is a tame summation on the office couch.
George is flabbergasted, and so is the Coach, at first. When Act II opens, the men are in the same position with Phil staring down the barrel as the team gathers around.
He then dissects the nature of the affair, trying to determine if Marion made the first move as if this will somehow exonerate Phil. To put it another way, does he have the strength to break away from the shackles of his past? Sounds like just the kind of dilemma the Coach should resolve, and this leads us to a behind the back pass to James. James has five kids, an alcoholic brother he provides for, and a detached wife. Everything is in the past tense.
James is about to get cut from the team, because the Coach thinks that George needs professional handlers to win this election. He vomits in the championship trophy, an act dripping literally with symbolism. This closes the curtain on Act II. The last character is the most enigmatic. He is the only character who can see through the phony life that his teammates have been leading ever since that last season ended. There are only four men and a coach in this play, but a basketball team requires five on the floor.
Where is the fifth man? The fifth man is the elusive Martin, the player who made the shot with one second left to win the championship game, but Martin has never been to one of these reunions.
Not one. All of his teammates recall his grace on the court, his contribution to victory. Tom knows why he has never been to a reunion. Shit, we stole it! The trophy is more deeply engrained into his very being than the names of his players are etched into its silver sides.
As he waxes eloquent on the past, a past that pre-dates the championship game, Coach recalls great slabs of beef at colorful picnics, buckets of ice cream, kites in the sky, Bach playing in his house, and his father quoting Shakespeare.
The Jews, he fumes, ruined his father, who went bankrupt during the depression. Fillmore High School wins it! The recording ends; silence reigns for a moment, but then George begins the old fight song, and soon the entire team joins in.
The fact is the four of them are on the way out with him, but only the drunk has the presence of mind to realize it. That Championship Season is divided into three acts, but this structure serves no obvious purpose since the play follows such a linear time line.
Act II and III begin at the very same point where the previous acts stop, but the first two acts do end on cliff hangers the shot gun and the barfing in the trophy , and this technique adds power to the drama. Miller was faithful to the unities of time and place, but he must have recognized that his play blitzes the audience with its provocative language and over-the-top characterizations.
He needed to insert rest periods just to let his audience, and his actors, catch their collective breath. This play is incredibly intense, especially if good actors dive into the meaty roles, and Miller was right to just let his characters duke it out on stage without any artifice or manipulation.
In spite of the incessant name calling, numerous betrayals, and the horrible realization that time has stolen twenty years from each of the five characters and left little in return, That Championship Season ends on a high note. The players and their coach, momentarily divided by the present, rally around their hallowed past and the trophy for a ceremonial picture. Coach got it right when he said that the trophy was undeniably real.
For one brief moment, the five men are once again Pennsylvania State Champions, and Miller implies that winning the trophy is more important than how it was won. That must be the difference between the game of basketball and the game of life.
Everyone likes a happy ending. I had the good fortune of seeing That Championship Season on Broadway in March of , the first time the play had been produced there since its debut in Some of the theatergoers undoubtedly came to see Jack Ryan from 24 and Mr. This says more about the power of television than the allure of the theater. The performance, however, was spell binding. The characters were so well defined and delineated, the dialogue so realistic, I felt like I was watching a novel portrayed on stage.
The way Miller intersperses camaraderie and nostalgia with betrayal and downright ugliness made a great impression on me. But there is something compelling about these five flawed men who try to reconcile the broken lives of their present with the unbroken glory of their past.
The Coach, played by Brian Cox, was surprising sympathetic in the production. After reading the play again, I am more alienated by his heavy-handed prejudices on the page than I was hearing him rant in the theater. Feb 09, Bobby Keniston rated it liked it. The edition I read was the Penguin Plays edition with an introduction by the brilliant Joe Papp, who said he saw so many problems with the play, but that it was an "actor's play" Maybe he's right.
Maybe I would like it better if I saw a production, I don't know. I will say, it's not every play that you see a blurb from "Sports Illustrated" on the back cover Maybe it's just that these characters should feel dated, but they still exist. Middle-aged men who look back on a "championship season" a The edition I read was the Penguin Plays edition with an introduction by the brilliant Joe Papp, who said he saw so many problems with the play, but that it was an "actor's play" Middle-aged men who look back on a "championship season" as though it was the most important thing to ever happen to them.
None of the characters are really all that likable, except for the alcoholic Tom at least he's honest. And that's okay characters don't have to be likable for a play to work. And who I am to criticize a play that won the Tony and the Pulitzer in the s? The racism and the misogyny just got old. And I know that the play is neither promoting or encouraging racism or misogyny, but it still gets old. And I feel that there are far too many points of crisis, and the acts feel more like cliffhangers than hitting a climax and striving for a resolution.
But, whatever. There's some very good dialogue, and I'm sure plenty of actors would love to play these parts. My grade: B This play hasn't aged well. It is a critique of white masculinity from , and its insights are interesting, but how Miller's play goes about offering us these insights is not very pleasurable. The play is populated by five white guys, four of which are actually just terrible human beings.
Phil is a wealthy strip mining entrepreneur who has been donating to George's campaigns in exchange for favourable terms on the land lease for his mining operations; unbeknownst to George, he is also having an affair with his wife, Marion.
James is the overworked and underpaid principal of a local junior high school and is George's campaign manager, hoping to be named superintendent of schools if George is re-elected.
Tom has become an alcoholic drifter. At the reunion, the tensions between the former basketball players quickly simmer to the surface. Coach hates dissent in the ranks, feeling it weakens the team dynamic, and tries to rally them as he has done for twenty years, but he can only speak in pep talk platitudes, addressing them as though they are still a basketball team in the middle of the big game, and it is clear that the players' overreliance on his trite guidance is a significant cause of their current unhappiness.
James tells George about Phil's affair with Marion, while Phil tries unsuccessfully to abandon the sinking ship of George's campaign by calling Sharmen to offer a donation in exchange for preserving the favourable terms of his lease. James is also outraged to discover that George is bringing in a new campaign team from Philadelphia to salvage his chances for re-election.
Did you know Edit. Trivia Robert Mitchum replaced William Holden. Holden was being considered for this picture but passed away shortly before the film started production and could accept the part. Goofs When Mayor Sitkowski is riding the exercise bicycle in his office in Scranton, the sun is shining outside, but the apparently live baseball game he is watching from Yankee Stadium is being played at night. Scranton isn't far enough west of the Bronx for this to happen. User reviews 14 Review. Top review.
The very definition of the term "little gem"! I won't carry on forever but I should say that this film is something of a well-kept secret it seems. One thing about "little gems" like this one is that if you hype them too much they become something else. If you see this movie with expectations too high then you might be disappointed, if on the other hand you watch it expecting to see one of the best low key character dramas you've probably seen in a while then you'll feel rewarded.
For once it was just great to watch a movie where, personally, every time I thought I knew what would happen, my expectations were defied. I'm not talking about any, now all too popular; so-called clever twists but just subtle turns in unexpected directions. In other words this is truthful cinema at its best, unexpected in the way life often really is.
To say that 'That Championship Season' is simply an allegory for faith in God is far too reductionist when discussing a film that has this much to say.
Of course the film could be read this way but I feel religious or political undertones are the in-essentials of this story. What is essential is the recognition of a little of ourselves in these characters that have been drawn so well, bitterness, regret, self-pity, greed, lust, bigotry but also love, sacrifice, forgiveness are all here in all characters and in more or less equal measure and depending on your point of view they have nothing to do with religion.
In short no one in this movie seems constructed, they simply live and breath the way we all try to, the lesson if any is simply to admit to some or all of those qualities in ourselves and to try and live a little better.
Rebelcowboy Mar 9, Details Edit. Release date January 14, United States. United States. Scranton, Pennsylvania, USA.
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