For fans of the book, a missed opportunity. Otherwise...

Rating: 7/10 (28 March 2007)

"The Natural," Bernard Malamud's 1952 novel on which this movie is (very loosely) based, presented a considerably more flinty viewpoint of baseball and its protagonist, the late-blooming Roy Hobbs. A movie true to Malamud's conception has yet to be made, and would probably start with a younger and less iconic actor in the starring role (Hobbs as written by Malamud was in his mid-30s, but Robert Redford's gravity suggests someone a decade older). In its own right, this is an enjoyable baseball fantasy with a nostalgic haze (literally so, in the way many scenes are lit). Randy Newman's score is the best thing about it, playing up the mythical Americana element of the movie. Twenty-three years after I first saw it in a theater, "The Natural" strikes me as a long-form version of the "Morning in America" TV ad campaign that helped propel Ronald Regaan to re-election that same year. No accident that two of the movers and shakers behind this movie were major players in the world of advertising.