I Will Buy You: A Review (Review #2145)

Welcome to Rick's Texan Reviews Annual Opening Day Movie Review, where I look at a baseball-related film to coincide with the AAA Opening Day for the El Paso Chihuahuas. This year, I look at the dark side of Japanese baseball.

Baseball is big business everywhere. Whatever purity the sport had disappeared once free agency came into existence. However, Japanese baseball was more corrupt if I Will Buy You is believed. A portrait of players both getting played and playing the financial field, I Will Buy You will make the viewer think about the high cost of a nation's pastime. 

Syowa University has an absolute baseball phenom in Goro Kurita (Minoru Oki). All the professional baseball teams lust after him. One of them is the Toyo Flowers. It is now up to their main scout Daisuke Kishimoto (Keiji Sada) to land Kurita for the team. That is easier said than done. Other teams are starting to woo not just Kurita but his family. There are gifts and lavish contracts being offered to land the valuable player.

Kishimoto is aware that Kurita has a vulnerable spot. That is his coach and mentor, Coach Kyuki (Yunosuke Ito). Kyuki is something of an informal father figure to Kurita. He is also a very shifty and eccentric fellow. Kyuki may also be dying. He complains about gallstones, but could it be something more serious? One person who is not impressed by any of this is Fudeko (Keiko Kishi). She is Kurita's girlfriend, who tells Kishimoto that she hates baseball. She is also sister to Kyuki's mistress, Ryoko (Mitsuko Mito). Fudeko knows that Kyuki is not just cheating on his wife but faking his illness.

The bidding for Kurita grows more intense as the college season is coming closer to conclusion. Kurita's four brothers (two full, two half) are not above dangling themselves to other teams like the Handen Lilies and Osaka Socks in exchange for influence. Fudeko pushes Kurita to drop baseball altogether, seeing what it is doing to him and others. Kishimoto for his part agrees to get Kyuki to be part of a Toyo Flowers deal. "I will buy you", he tells the Coach when he asked Kishimoto if he would buy him. Whiskey, money, even a cow are offered and presented to the Kurita family. Is Kyuki really faking his illness? Which team will Kurita choose? Will he get played or is he a master player? Will the negotiations bring wealth and fortune to the Kurita family, or will they bring death?

There is something dark and cynical in director Masaki Kobayashi's film. I Will Buy You shows that the various teams will stop at nothing short of actual murder and abduction to get a player. Kishimoto remarks late in the film that players like Kurita are not seen as players but as commodities. This is very true, more so now. What price, metaphorical and literal, they are willing to pay is what drives I Will Buy You. Fudeko is more direct in her bitter assessment of the bidding war. "What the hell is baseball anyway? In your world, you buy and sell people. It's socially condoned human trafficking", she tells Kishimoto. 

I Will Buy You looks at how not just teams but even individuals lose perspective. "Am I worth that much? Makes me nervous", Kurita tells Kishimoto and Kyuki when hearing about the latest proposals. One of the rival team scouts compares Goro's oldest brother to Godzilla. There is an offscreen tragedy that befalls someone. We do get the beginning of it, and it shocks the viewer to see how dangerous the negotiations are.

There are no heroes in I Will Buy You. Even Fudeko, who should be the only one genuinely looking out for Kurita's interests, is herself blind. She may genuinely believe that someone is playing dirty tricks to get his way. However, we find that in the end she was tragically wrong. Kyuki is not a good man. "I used to teach bayonet fighting to young Chinese girls", he explains to Kishimoto when he hears Kyuki speak strong Chinese. That is a shocking admission given that China and Japan were antagonists in the war. Later on, Kishimoto is told that Kyuki was a spy for the Chinese during the war. We know that he has a mistress. Is he thoroughly deceitful to get his own way?

I Will Buy You has excellent performances all around. Keiji Sada is excellent as the driven, determined but ultimately conflicted Kishimoto. We see how he will keep working to land Kurita for the Toyo Flowers. However, we see how ultimately, he is disgusted by Kurita's own selfishness when it comes to his father figure. Yunosuke Ito's Kyuki has the viewer shift in their view of him. He can look sympathetic, then duplicitous, then self-interested and ultimately as tragic. Ito makes Kyuki a troubled and troubling man. Minoru Oki's Kurita too can appear at times almost lost in the seedy world of baseball bidding. However, he also shows that Kurita is no innocent but perhaps the best wolf around. Keiko Kishi is pretty. She is also strong as Fudeko, the woman aware of how corrupting the world has become and perhaps always was. 

One thing that Masaki Kobayashi did in I Will Buy You which surprised me was in how he used music. Whenever we hear Kishimoto's thoughts, they are accompanied by a theremin. It gives the film a spooky feel, almost like a horror film. Zenzo Matsuyama's screenplay also allows for amusing moments. In one scene, we see the Osaka Socks scout struggling in pulling a cow to offer the family to, much to the villager's amusement. It is a bit of a respite from the sometimes-seedy world we see. 

One is not surprised by the intensity of the bidding for the elites in any sport. Baseball just seems to draw the most attention. We live in an age of multimillion, multiyear contracts for even a lower-end baseball player. Curiously enough, it is a Japanese player who is now the face of massive contracts from a winner-take-all team. The cost of a Shohei Otani is bigger than it was for an Ichiro Suzuki. A scout wants the best players for his/her team. How far they will go is a question that I Will Buy You asks. It is also a question that has yet to be answered. 

DECISION: B+

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