Hustle
ESPN

The confluence of personalities involved in the making of Hustle is just plain weird. First, there's the movie's subject, Pete Rose, baseball's all-time hit leader, who denied for years that he bet on baseball despite a Major League Baseball investigation that said otherwise, only to cop to the charge in a seeming ploy to strike a deal with commissioner Bud Selig to get into the Hall of Fame.

Playing Rose is Tom Sizemore, whose acting career (Heat, Saving Private Ryan, Black Hawk Down) has been overshadowed by multiple arrests, a parole violation after a positive meth test and a conviction for abuse of ex-girlfriend and the Hollywood madame herself, Heidi Fleiss.

Directing is Peter Bogdanovich, who soared to the top of Hollywood at the age of 32 with such films as The Last Picture Show and Paper Moon. One of the most tragic figures in recent Hollywood history, Bogdanovich saw his career plummet after he dumped wife Polly Platt for a whirlwind marriage to and messy divorce from Cybill Shepherd. He then suffered tragedy when his girlfriend, Playmate of the Year Dorothy Stratten, was murdered by her estranged husband in 1980. Bogdanovich went on to marry Stratten's 18-year-old sister in 1988 and then divorced her in 2001.

Against the backdrop of his personal life, Bogdanovich's meteroic career burned brighter and vaporized quicker than perhaps any other filmmaker's, relegating him for the last decade or so to TV movie purgatory. His only studio film in the past decade was 2001's The Cat's Meow, which seemed to be an apology of sorts. Bogdnanovich, who has used film as a sort of self-administered psychotherapy, postulated that the relatonship of megalomaniacal media mogul William Randolph Hearst to Marion Davies was a criminally compulsive desire to seduce and control her with his power. This from the most relentless name-dropper in the history of Hollywood, who submarined his own career when he personally tried to make Shepherd a star a la Josef von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich, and who as a young hotshot director housed and cared for Orson Welles until the legend's death.

These are the people ESPN assembled for its Pete Rose movie.

On the surface, they couldn't be more different: Bogdanovich, the haughty fallen artist; Sizemore, the berserk tough guy; and Rose, the awkward superstar. But the thread that weaves these personalities together is self-destructive compulsion. All three have fallen from grace, becoming privately and publicly tragic figures. In their own ways, they're all functionally manic depressives. And considering the latitude ESPN probably gave Bogdanovich (remember the WMD-caliber F-bombs in the Bobby Knight movie?), there was definitely potential for these three energies to combine into something truly weird, and possibly insane.

To an extent, Hustle delivers. According to Bogdanovich, whose only previous encounter with baseball was a limo-chauffered trip to Dodger Stadium with Cary Grant, Rose's fall from grace was precipitated by an underlying homoerotic relationship with a starstruck young hotshot blinded by the glare of stardom. There's a lot of talk about whether this story element is "true" or not, which of course concerns ESPN's audience and Joe Morgan, but is clearly of absolutely no interest to Bogdanovich. He just follows the Dowd Report, which formerly detailed Rose's alleged links to gambling and led to his agreement to a lifetime ban from baseball, to the letter and concentrates instead on the relationship between Rose and bookie "Paulie" Janszen (Dash Mihok). In fact, this movie has absolutely nothing to do with anything we know about Pete Rose. Considering what Bogdanovich makes of Rose's relationships, it's as if he used the template of the Pete Rose story to force Sizemore to re-create Bogdanovich's own personal demons.

The movie opens with a video montage of the real-life Rose's run to beat Ty Cobb's record, set to Bruce Springsteen's "Glory Days." To Bogdanovich's credit, he uses the irony of the song to foreshadow Rose's fall. But as the rest of the soundtrack shows, Bogdanovich has no knowledge or interest in the particularities of jock world. He just digs up some ultra-clichéd '80s pop tunes and applies them literally to individual scenes: Rose walks into a gym to Kenny Loggins' "Danger Zone," repays a debt to "Don't You Forget About Me," celebrates a horse race to Peter Gabriel's "Big Time," hits on groupies watching him gamble to "Addicted to Love" and gets caught gambling to "Don't Dream It's Over." Bogdanovich couldn't care less about recreating the world of Pete Rose — he's got his agenda, and whatever shortcuts he can take around baseball are OK with him.

Bogdanovich's thesis is that Janszen, Rose's go-between bookie, was seduced by the fame of the ballplayer, who took to the kid because, in the light of his own social awkwardness, the kid's innocence was attractive. That sounds like what Bogdanovich thinks of his relationship with Welles. The first hour of the movie is mostly Rose trying to coerce Janszen into placing bets for him: "C'mon Paulie, we're just having a little fun here!" Every time Janszen gets wary, Rose showers some gifts on the boy: "Who loves ya?" Eventually, Rose spends so much time with Janszen that his wife becomes jealous. They team up to score groupies — the only difference between them and Greg Kinnear and Willem Dafoe in Auto Focus is that Rose doesn't film it and they don't masturbate together on the couch. There's even a kind of lover's spat between Janszen and his friend when Janszen's relationship with Rose starts to dominate his life.

Eventually, Rose enmeshes Janszen in his web of lies and deception by inviting the kid into the clubhouse. This rankles the team, even drawing Marge Schott (who should have been played by Kathy Bates) into the fray. But Rose is so devoted to the innocent Janszen that he virtually bribes the kid into being his closest confidante. Rose's wife leaves him, but no matter. Rose takes signals from Janszen in the stands during Reds games. There's lots of talk about "balls": having balls when you gamble, having balls on the baseball diamond, fondling balls when you're signing them for money. Rose even literally rips off his shirt to give to Janszen when he threatens to leave. Other than those elements, it's not really homoerotic at all.

To Sizemore's credit, his Pete Rose is better than what you should rightfully expect from an ESPN movie. In fact, while you may not be able to believe that this is Pete Rose, you sure as hell can't believe it's Tom Sizemore. Sizemore's Rose is hunched over with a springing walk that suggests extreme social awkwardness. This is, after all, the same man who ruined a friend's career by plowing into him at an All-Star Game, like a guy taking a family reunion flag football game too seriously. Sizemore's eyes shift around the room, unsure of himself, relying on the thrills of being rich and famous to prop himself up. At first, we see this as harmless, but Sizemore takes Rose from sadness to depression to desperation, all in this unconfident mumble. Rose is far more comfortable with men than women, who require a social grace beyond his reach; Sizemore just puts his face a few inches from groupie cleavage and stares right into the abyss. Sizemore retains his dignity, even when spouting dialogue like this: "Where you goin'?" "Egypt." "Bring me back a mummy." You expect Sizemore to play Pete Rose like Dave Chappelle plays Rick James, but Sizemore and Bogdanovich create the kind of internalized performance heretofore unseen in ESPN Original Entertainment.

In the same way that Bogdanovich tells the story of his own personal seduction by Orson Welles, Sizemore delves into his own troubles by creating a Pete Rose seduced by fame's indulgences — and ESPN lets him! By drawing on these masculine archetypes, perhaps Hustle tells us a little bit about Pete Rose the man. The problem is that none of it leads to anything. In the last act, Bogdanovich just replaces Sizemore's Moe Howard wig with a lesbian-chic spike cut and lets the tape run out. Bogdanovich has Rose matter-of-factly lie to the commission and expects that to be his big tragic statement about how underlying homoerotic tension can consume great men. That's not a money shot.

A younger, more energetic Bogdanovich might have done something remarkably crazy. Maybe I'm making too much of the resemblance of his movie's Bart Giamatti to the older Orson Welles, but I can see him filming Rose's testimony before the Dowd Commission like Welles' The Trial, using Sizemore's paranoia to build to a giant breakdown to rival Anthony Perkins' in that film. But Hustle's limp-dicked ending ultimately diminishes any merit it otherwise had, showing that Bogdanovich never had a statement to make — just an idea to toy with and then lose interest in.

— Stephen Himes (stephenhimes@hotmail.com)