Billy Porter, Rita Moreno, Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin in a scene from "80 For Brady." (Scott Garfield / Paramount, Scott Garfield / Paramount)
Tom Brady says he’s retiring from football for real this time. But along with his Super Bowl rings, and that nagging string of resume asterisks on the topic of suspicious football air pressure levels, he’ll always have “80 for Brady.”
Some movies are sports merchandising tie-ins, plain and simple; this one’s plainer and simpler than most. The man in the title, who also appears in a key supporting role as himself, produced this project. How’d it come about?
In brief: Hollywood agent Max Gross, currently with the agency William Morris Endeavor, has a Patriots-fan grandmother, Betty Pensavalle,now 94. She and her friends formed an “Over 80 for Brady” fan club, and Gross had special jerseys made up for them. He thought they’d make a cute movie. So did Brady’s production company. And here we are.
There wouldn’t be much “here” here if it weren’t for Lily Tomlin, Jane Fonda, Rita Moreno and Sally Field playing wholly invented versions of the real ladies. Far from biopic-land, sceenwriters Emily Halpern and Sarah Haskins take the kernel of the premise — friends of a certain age, bound by Brady love — and pop up a bucket of fictionalized popcorn, to occasionally funny and determinedly heartwarming results.
For years, the movie’s four Massachusetts ladies have gathered on Super Bowl Sunday with special attention paid to games involving their cherished Patriots. Over those years, ringleader Lou (Tomlin) has survived cancer, buoyed by her friends’ love and support. Fonda plays romance novelist Trish, whose NFL fan fiction includes the discreetly erotic potboiler “Between a Gronk and a Hard Place.”
Moreno’s Maura, a widow since the previous year, has attracted a friend and suitor, Mickey (Glynn Turman). Practical, buttoned-up Betty (Field) is married to a sweet, semi-hapless professor (Bob Balaban). The ladies contrive a way to secure tickets to the Super Bowl in Houston. The movie’s set in 2017, the year the Patriots played the Falcons in a memorably ridiculous comeback saga. What happens next? Betty loses track of the golden tickets during a superhot chicken wing-eating contest hosted by superstar chef Guy Fieri.(Guy Fieri plays Guy Fieri; at one point, after ingesting hallucinogeic gummies, one of the ladies imagines she has transformed into Guy Fieri.)
In Houston, Trish meets a dashing former NFL star, played by Harry Hamlin. He’s their ticket to skybox heaven. Meantime Lou’s daughter keeps calling her with lines such as “Mom, did you call the hospital?” indicating the cancer may have returned. First-time feature director Kyle Marvin pushes it along, one triumph or setback at a time, from wing-eating to high-stakes poker to quarterback challenges at the NFL Experience, to Billy Porter hiring the 80-for-Bradys as his backup dancers.
It’s ungallant to single out MVPs in this ensemble. Nonetheless: If it weren’t for Moreno’s wizardly comic wiles and Field’s unerring, unforced timing, “80 for Brady” would not be here, there or much of anywhere. There is one tiny miracle of screenwriting, arriving just in time: “80 for Brady” imagines the shocking truth of what happened with the 2017 Super Bowl’s third-quarter, 28-3 state of things, Falcons over Patriots, to spark a reversal of fortune.
Watching “80 for Brady,” I thought about the obscure 1962 “Safe at Home!”, which was a fictional story about a kid who, through some routine plotting, gets to meet his baseball heroes, Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris. Every generation generates its own paragons of sport, and its own less-than-paragonical sports movies. “80 for Brady” is about four women who get to meet their football hero, here framed, semi-comically, as a god among men. You can be sure no one ever, ever makes a joke about Brady’s alleged involvement in the Deflategate saga in this producer’s project.
The on-screen leading women? They’re pros playing a semi-pro game, sincerely. They hit ‘em high. They hit ‘em low. And they get the job done.
“80 for Brady” — 2.5 stars (out of 4)
MPA rating: PG-13 (for brief strong language, some drug content and some suggestive references)
Running time: 1:38
How to watch: Premieres in theaters Thurs. Feb. 2.
Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.
Twitter @phillipstribune
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Originally published at Tribune News Service