Review of The Natural (1984) by Edith N — 10 May 2012

All-American Mythos.

Baseball is really the secular American religion. It's impossible, at this point, to imagine a US President winning election despite not being a Christian, but it's even harder to imagine winning the election despite not liking baseball. Which we'll just add to the list of reasons I'm never going to be President, but let it go. There are a lot of movie about baseball out there, some of which I even like (I own two baseball movies starring Charlie Sheen, if you can believe that), and in fact there are probably more movies about baseball than any other sport. Shockingly, the AFI "top ten of ten" sports list doesn't include this, or indeed half the great baseball movies out there. But simply put, if you're going to combine any sport with Arthurian legend, as this movie (and presumably the book it's based on) attempts to do, baseball is the obvious choice. Even I who do not like it concede that there is a kind of magic there, though the one I see isn't the one fans do.

Roy Hobbes (Robert Redford) wants to be the Best There Ever Was. He wants to be the greatest baseball player of all time. And then he gets shot by the mysterious Harriet Bird (Barbara Hershey) and disappears for sixteen years. When he resurfaces, he is signed as a third baseman for the New York Knights. It's part of a power play between Pop Fisher (Wilford Brimley) and the Judge (Robert Prosky). If the Knights win the pennant, the Judge is out. If they lose, Pop Fisher is out. And boy, are they going to lose. Pop doesn't want to give him a change, but when he does, Roy surprises him by hitting one that breaks the scorecard clock. The Knights begin to win. However, the Judge persuades Memo Paris (Kim Basinger), Pop's bad-luck niece, to go after Roy. She does, and he stops hitting--and the Knights stop winning. Then one day, Iris Gaines (Glenn Close) appears in the stands, the woman from Roy's past, and everything changes again.

I cannot imagine better casting for the role than Robert Redford. He looks the part perfectly; he was too old for the role, but you can believe he's the thirty-five-year-old "oldest rookie." When he was young, Robert Redford was the idealized image of American youth. He was, in short, a golden boy. Not as starkly handsome as Paul Newman, but a lot more wholesome-looking. And by 1984, he merely looked like a golden boy who had gone to seed some. Who had seen a lot of life and done things he never thought he'd do. We don't know what Roy Hobbes was doing for those lost sixteen years, but we know it wasn't anything he'd ever meant to do, and you can imagine that it's that rough life, not the extra decade, that created those wrinkles, that slightly roughened skin. When Robert Redford stands in that glorious golden light, he is the magic of baseball personified. Especially when Glenn Close is watching him wearing a white dress. It's a perfect baseball moment.

And oh, yes, this is a variation on certain Arthurian tropes. And, yes, there's Homeric subtext, too. I don't know if it's what Bernard Malamud intended, but I'd be surprised if it weren't. Baseball is the enduring myth of twentieth-century America, just like cowboys are the enduring myth of the nineteenth century and the Founding Fathers are the enduring myth of the seventeenth century. The United States is a young country, and we tie our mythology into older roots--in part, I think, because we are a nation of immigrants. (I'd rather like to discuss this movie with Neil Gaiman and see how he ties it in to [i]American Gods[/i].) And indeed, that's why I can't see why the AFI thinks [i]Bull Durham[/i], a movie I didn't even finish, is a better sports movie than this. This movie plays with light, with myth, with imagery in a way that few other movies do, and I'm not sure why [i]Jerry Maguire[/i] ranked higher, come to that. There is a lot that is classic about this, even if I don't much care if I ever see it again.

And, yeah, it's a bit spoiled for me by the rest of the cast. Every time Pop said he should have been a farmer, all I could think was that he should have raised oats. Which is one of two [i]MST3K[/i] references I was making to myself, because the character of "The Whammer" means that we all were, when you get right down to it, watching a Joe Don Baker movie. I love Richard Farnsworth, and he's one of the many Oscar-nominated actors in this, but in my head, he's just always going to be Matthew Cuthbert from [i]Anne of Green Gables[/i]. I'm not sure I'd entirely rate this as an all-star cast, though heaven knows Robert Duvall isn't exactly a nobody. Michael Madsen and Darren McGavin, too. They threw me out of the story at least as much as the firm belief I had that Roy ought to have gotten a second opinion about what, exactly, was wrong with him. Though it's entirely possible that the same cast would have held my attention better if it had been in a movie about something I cared more about.