BEFORE: From one sports movie to another, switching from football to the more seasonally appropriate baseball. Really, it's just a coincidence that one sports film follows another, I put this here because an actor carries over - Eloy Casados, who played a football player in "The Best of Times", plays Louis Prima in this one. Another coincidence: this film was directed by Ron Shelton, who wrote the screenplay for last night's film.
THE PLOT: A reporter hired to write the 'official' biography of Ty Cobb discovers just how dark the baseball legend's real story is.
AFTER: Most sports biopics play out in proper chronological order, and tend to focus on the best part of a legend's career, or perhaps some of his best games - perhaps there would be a modern framing device as the athlete reminisces, before flashing back to show him in his heyday. This one goes a different route and focuses on the aging, retired Ty Cobb as he works with a reporter hired to write his official biography. The film then spends most of its time in the present - umm, more recent past, 1960 or 1961 - detailing the difficulty the reporter has in dealing with Cobb. Oh, there are flashbacks, but most of them don't even involve baseball, just traumatic events from Cobb's childhood and young adult life.
This technique is both good and bad - it doesn't gloss over the seamier aspects of Cobb's life, not just pointing out he was a racist and abusive asshole, but practically reveling in it - but also bad, because we never really get to see him play baseball, so instead we have to rely on announcers quoting his statistics or people praising him at functions. It's a terrible, glaring violation of the "Show, don't tell" rule. (EDIT: Apparently, according to IMDB, Tommy Lee Jones had broken his leg prior to shooting, and was in a cast most of the time. Perhaps this drastically affected the amount of baseball footage they were able to shoot.)
Sure, a man's life is more than his accomplishments, and a baseball player's career is more than just a bunch of stats, but seeing someone play the game is ten times more exciting than hearing people talk about it. And in between revelations about how his father died, and that guy he might have shot in Reno just to watch him die that one time, couldn't he have also reminisced a bit about a particularly noteworthy game or two? OK, so we get to see him sliding into second, spikes first, with one leg raised to catch the second baseman right in the "dugout". Cobb apparently turned baseball from a pastime into a contact sport, and is probably the reason players had to start wearing cups.
Problem is, the things we learn about Cobb outside of baseball are not exactly endearing, so the film doesn't really allow his baseball accomplishments to counteract his personal foibles. But on the other hand, by portraying his darker side (Cobb was like the moon, there's no real "dark side", depending on where you looked from, it could all be dark) perhaps we're meant to feel as if this portrait is more accurate. Still, it's about as subtle as a fastball to the head.
Also starring Tommy Lee Jones (last seen in "Hope Springs"), Robert Wuhl (last seen in "Blue Chips"), Lolita Davidovitch (last seen in "Hollywood Homicide"), Lou Myers (last seen in "Tin Cup"), Ned Bellamy, Rhoda Griffis, with cameos from Bradley Whitford (last seen in "Saving Mr. Banks"), Roger Clemens, Jimmy Buffett.
RATING: 3 out of 10 bench-clearing brawls
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