Review of The Natural (1984) by Alex V — 01 May 2008

This movie uses baseball to create a nostalgic image of America from the 1920s and 1930s, a more innocent time not only for the country but for baseball itself.

To be turned off by the overt sentimentality of The Natural is to miss the point entirely. This is not a movie that ever purports to be a realistic portrayal of a baseball player. Roy Hobbs is enigmatic, an amalgamation of many of the most revered players in the history of baseball.

There's more to his story than his ability at baseball. It's also about redemption, overcoming the failures of your past, tragedy and triumph. The music by Randy Newman is rightfully cited as one of the greatest scores in the history of sports movies; very few people haven't heard its main theme, and its significance has only increased since its release.

It's not perfect. Most of the secondary characters are never really fleshed out, and as a result, Hobbs is the only character that can be accurately described as three-dimensional. It's too bad that this is the case, because the emotional payoff in the final scene of the movie is lessened by the fact that we don't really know one of the characters at all.

It also runs a little long (144 minutes for the director's cut), which is too much considering the extended periods during the movie without any baseball action. It's a little surprising that a movie almost two and a half hours long doesn't ever take much time to develop the secondary characters. This isn't that detrimental because the story is Hobbs' through-and-through, but it would've been nice to know a little more about the other people in his life.

Those issues aside, it's not difficult to see why this has become the "classic" of baseball movies. Loving baseball will add a degree of satisfaction (also the ability to point out a few technical errors), but it's not entirely necessary to enjoy this. If you want to see an uplifting movie about a more innocent period in our history, this is a good bet.