The game in The Mosquito Bowl has a clear attraction to men about to be sent into circumstances they cannot control. A football field offers rules people have spent years learning. The next few minutes can be understood as a set of decisions, and everyone knows what it would mean to get through them. Peter Berg’s film, adapted from Buzz Bissinger’s book, follows college football players who join the Marines after Pearl Harbor and takes its title from a game played on Guadalcanal. The strongest idea in the material is the chance to use all that skill and concentration for an afternoon that somebody has chosen to make possible.
Berg knows enough about football to see the pleasure in a formation settling. The athletes have made a kind of shared knowledge out of repetition. A teammate can know where someone else is supposed to go without having to ask him in a moment of exposure. The movie wants the same competence to be recognizable in war. It could go further in observing the times when the comparison fails. On a field a mistake has consequences that can be collectively understood. In battle it may take years for anybody to establish why an ordinary act turned out to be consequential.
The real game took place on Christmas Eve, which gives the time set aside for it a particularly poignant character. A holiday can be a reminder of a life a serviceman has yet to see again. Football offers an immediate way of doing something familiar in the company of people who already know how to do it. That arrangement is more affecting than a direct comparison between the gridiron and combat. It puts a stretch of life the men chose to lead inside an undertaking that increasingly dictates the use of their time. The film has good reason to let the separation be visible.
Nicholas Galitzine, Bill Skarsgård, Ray Nicholson and Tom Francis have the difficult work of separating lives the film keeps asking to move toward a collective fate. A young man’s manner of accepting praise can tell us something his accomplishments do not. So can the person he looks for after finishing a play. The military passages could give the performers more opportunities to carry the traces of habits developed far from the service. A broad sense of camaraderie is easy to recognize. It gives less shape to the particular losses the film eventually needs the audience to reckon with.
The film spends enough time away from the game that the title begins to feel like a promise about an organizing event that will make the earlier material cohere. The football has a different possibility as an interruption. Men who are used to being valuable for the uses an institution can make of them have an afternoon when they can decide what some of their abilities are worth to one another. The movie’s effort to make the game carry a large statement about sacrifice narrows the room for that smaller freedom. The circumstances around it already give the play unusual weight.
The names matter in a story so ready to talk about men in the aggregate. John McLaughry, Bob Bauman, Tony Butkovich and Dave Schreiner can enter service with reputations acquired in front of entirely different crowds. The first opportunity Berg has with each is to show what happens to those reputations when they become information the other men may or may not care about. A film that lets the players disagree about what they were good at would give their common fate a more specific cost. The actors have much more to work with when camaraderie emerges from a difference somebody in the group has noticed.
Berg has a reliable ability to make bodies moving together understandable in a large frame. The most striking passages put that ability in contact with the chance that some of the men will vanish from the group before it has had time to see them as separate people. The film tends to reach for a more established vocabulary of wartime honor at those points. There is sincerity in the gesture. A greater trust in the particular preparations for one game would bring the men a little closer.
