"You're Mickey Mantle, Goddammit!"

The late, great David Halberstam on the historical accuracy of a flick I love, 61:

The movie has many attractive qualities. Barry Pepper, who plays Maris, looks eerily like him; if anything, his performance is somewhat flat because the man he is playing is so flat. By contrast, Thomas Jane, playing Mantle, is marvelous with a wonderful, raw country boy outrageousness -- Mantle, after all, was always a much better show than Maris.

I think it is in some ways a surprisingly accurate portrait of this moment, and that might be the problem. Because for all of it's good qualities, "61*" seems somewhat less than the sum of its parts.

Part of this stems from the lack of drama. A baseball season is, in the end, a baseball season; it is not about life and death. The drama of a home run derby which took place 40 years ago is limited by the fact that we know how it came out, especially since the more accurate it is, the more limited the emotional range of its principal player is going to be.