BEFORE: Continuing with the baseball theme - like last night's film, this is also based on a true story.
THE PLOT: A Texas baseball coach makes the major league after agreeing to try out if his high school team made the playoffs.
AFTER: This is a great baseball movie that's about so much more than baseball. It's sort of like "The Bad News Bears" meets "Bull Durham" meets "Field of Dreams". With similarities to "Up", in that the central character is an older guy whose dreams almost pass him by. Aw, heck, I've got to throw "It's a Wonderful Life" into the mix too, because of the uplifting, community-rallies-together parts.
Baseball is just a metaphor, a conduit to tell the story of a high-school coach who motivates his players by promising to give his baseball career one last shot, so it's about the way that students learn from teachers (and vice versa), and the way that different people can come together as a team, plus it's about not giving up on one's crazy dreams, about a man trying to gain his father's respect (and re-gain his own self-respect), and a spouse who loves her husband enough to let him take a chance with his career. I can't describe it without using a lot of clichés, but these concepts all really work within the film.
Against all odds, and rational career advice, Jimmy Morris's fastball gets him a try-out with the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, and he works his way up through the farm system, in places like Orlando and Durham, spending months on the road away from his family. There's a nice contrast between the young 20-year old players and Morris - the kids are party-loving hotshots, but nothing shuts them up like a 98-mph pitch, as Morris slowly gains their respect. It's a great, rich inner conflict as well, as Morris has to balance his dreams with his responsibility to his family - in essence he has to allow himself to succeed in order to make it to the show.
I never thought about the inherent irony of a relief pitcher before. Here's a player who wants his team to win, but also he wants them to fail, so that they need to put him in the game. But fail only by a little, so he's not put into a situation that he can't pitch his way out of. Now that's sort of interesting...
I often joke around that I play minor-league baseball in a sense - I've got two jobs for small companies in a corner of the entertainment industry, and I sometimes wonder if I've got what it takes to work for a larger company like Disney or Marvel. I haven't made anything like a career move in 16 years, but I figure some guys spend their whole career in the "minors", and that's OK. So I really understand the sort of indecision that Morris faces in this film. My father spent decades running a small family-owned trucking company - and he only went to work for one of the big guys, New Penn, when he was in his 50's and needed to build up a pension.
What if I move up to a larger company, and find out that I can't cut it - then I become just some faceless, self-hating cog in the entertainment machine? Worse yet, what if I'm metaphorically in the majors now, right where I should be, and I don't realize it? If that's the case, I should stay where I am as long as possible - certainly I've met enough people over the years that dream of being in my position...it's maddening.
Anyway, I'm projecting. This film really got to me, I admit I teared up a few times. Go out and have a catch with your dad (or son), everyone...
Starring Dennis Quaid, Rachel Griffiths, Brian Cox, Alex Gonzalez (who was later great on the short-lived CW show "Reaper") and Angus T. Jones (yeah, the cute kid from "Two and a Half Men", back when he actually was a cute kid)
RATING: 8 out of 10 radar guns
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