The Best of Times (1986)

In trying to figure out what went wrong with The Best of Times, I lean back on the dinner that I had last night – I’m working up an analysis, just go with me on this.  I had pizza from a mom-and-pop joint that has been around for years but I hear is on its way out.  My review of the pizza is pretty much the same as it is for this movie: It’s okay, but it needs something, maybe a difference sauce, maybe some spices, maybe a little more on the cook time.  It needs rethinking because the finished product is bland and leaves you feeling disappointed.

The ingredients are here.  This is a satire about a pair of middle-aged former high school football stars Reno (Kurt Russell) and Jack (Robin Williams) who still live in the same small town of Taft, California where Jack works as a bank V.P. and obsesses over a crucial catch in their 1972 faceoff against the rival Bakersfield team, in which he dropped a crucial pass and game ended in a tie. Jack knows that he can rewrite history and becomes obsessed with restaging the game against the better and clearer thinking of Reno, their wives and the whole town.

As concepts go, this is a pretty good one.  Written by Ron Shelton, it’s the kind of small-town slice-of-life that Frank Capra or Preston Sturges might have turned into a re-runnable classic.  But director Roger Spottiswood is not Capra or Sturges and the movie never really finds a reality for this small town.  It’s there, but it all feels manufactured and a story like this needs colorful characters and a lived-in feeling.

One of the problems, I think, is Robin Williams who never gets into character as he did in Moscow on the Hudson or even Popeye.  In his manic moments, he spins off into the kinds of jokes that come from his stand-up act (he does of LOT of this) and, quite frankly, it breaks the reality so we’re just watching Robin Williams as he appears on The Tonight Show.

This movie, like my pizza, just needed a little more attention, a little more care, a little better chef to pull it all together.  But this is a movie, a movie-movie, one that never feels like it takes place in a universe or any functional reality.  It was almost there, but it fumbles the ball.