The Natural

Day 101 - 4/11/09 - Movie #99

BEFORE: I'll wrap up Baseball Week with this classic Redford film - it's set in the late 1930's, when men all wore hats, and women were called "dames". You can always count on Redford to play the most naive, most noble, and usually the prettiest person in the room.

THE PLOT: A baseball player comes out of seemingly nowhere to become a legendary player with almost divine talent.

AFTER: The film has more baseball cliches than you can shake a bat at - the aging manager who's got one last chance at a pennant, Roy Hobbs literally knocking the cover off the ball...the pacing is a little slow but it leads up to a great payoff. The film is stocked with these old-timey actors like Wilford Brimley, Robert Prosky and Richard Farnsworth, maybe to make Redford look young by comparison. Redford's character is supposed to be in his late 30's, but everyone calls him "Kid", and I can't tell if they were trying to be ironic or not. There are moments that are cornier than the cornfield in "Field of Dreams" - Kim Basinger plays the bad-luck temptress that puts Hobbs in a slump, and Glenn Close is the farmgirl from his past who lifts him out of it.
But, the folksiness seems appropriate for the "golden age" of baseball, and there are a solid number of those great dramatic baseball moments, where the gameplay goes into slow-motion, and the music swells...

RATING: Minus 2 (for corniness) leaves 8 out of 10 homers.