A Shot at Glory (2002)
*/****
starring Robert Duvall, Michael Keaton, Ally McCoist, Libby Langdon
screenplay by Denis O’Neill
directed by Michael Corrente
by Walter Chaw Edited by David Ray (an awfully dignified name, methinks, for a chimp with a razor), A Shot at Glory is easily the worst-assembled film I’ve seen in ages, so incomprehensibly inept that the idea of continuity is not merely abandoned but trod and spit upon. The film’s pacing is lax, there is never anything approaching tension, and there is such a disconnect between shots (let alone between scenes) that the whole exercise plays like a particularly pointless and chaotic montage. I suspect the only reason the thing makes any sense at all is through one’s overwhelming familiarity with the underdog sports intrigue and the UK working-class saga. In other words, we have an idea of what’s going on in A Shot at Glory because it’s Hoosiers meets The Full Monty–neither scrimping on the male nudity nor the crusty “working class schleps make good” formula that such a horrific union implies. That’s also probably why the film got made in the first place.
David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive contends that the answer to the eternal struggle between what is real and what is fantasy comes in the form of a Keatsian confusion–it’s the difference between Adam’s dream and Eve rendered flesh, blurred in the mind of the creator and his audience. A film is a dream of the director made tangible, a conceit familiar from the fourth-wall-breaking in Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (banishing any mystery there might have been regarding the visual references to that film in Lynch’s piece), and a movie’s characters therefore become projections of its maker’s sublimated longing (clarifying too the auteur’s use of wardrobe and colour schemes from Hitchcock’s meditation on objectification, Vertigo, as well as those of his first collaboration with inamorata Tippi Hedren, The Birds).