Reflecting back on the week it took to write the screenplay for Taxi Driver, Paul Schrader talked about an urgency so great, it was like an out-of-body experience: “It jumped out of my head like an animal.” Playing For Keeps is the exact opposite of that—if there’s any relationship between urgency and prolificacy, it must have taken 50 years of missed deadlines for the ooze of apathy and defeat to coalesce into a first draft. The film is a bedroom farce without the farce, a fish-out-of-water comedy on sun-cracked lake-bed, a story of fatherly redemption that barely gets past the hair-mussing stage. Even the title represents a weak compromise: Once called Playing The Field in reference to its hero being a retired soccer star and ladies’ man, it’s now the generic Playing For Keeps, under the presumed logic that the Kool-Aid wasn’t watery enough.
