Sentimental schmaltz

Rating: 5/10 (9 April 2011)

The Natural is not a baseball movie. It's a fable, a fairy tale, a fantasy which just happens to be centered around a baseball player. It probably would have been better as a baseball movie. The movie drowns in sentimentality, few movies have ever laid it on as thick as this one does with its portrayal of the godlike Roy Hobbs. Roy's a mythical superhero. At least that's the effect the movie's going for. Unfortunately this superhero is a complete idiot. All he cares about is baseball and his vain quest to be the best there ever was. Unfortunately his quest is derailed before it ever gets a chance to properly begin. But when years later he somehow gets a second chance he screws it up all over again by making the same exact mistakes he made the first time. Here's a helpful hint for the audience in case you can't figure it out, because Roy sure can't. Woman dressed in black...bad. Woman dressed in white...good. Yes, this is one simplistic fairy tale all right.
Aside from all the sentimental overload the movie's other big problem is Robert Redford. Not because Redford gives a bad performance as Roy Hobbs, because he doesn't, but for the simple fact that he is much, much, much too old to believably play the part. Yes the story is about an old man, at least in baseball terms. But not that old. Redford was pushing fifty when he made this movie. He just doesn't look the part as the 35-year old Hobbs we see for most of the movie. And at the start of the movie, when Redford plays Hobbs at the age of nineteen? All the favorable lighting and makeup in the world wasn't going to prevent that from looking truly absurd. It's hard to buy into the movie when the great baseball star looks like your grandpa. For comparison's sake a key role, that of old, cantankerous manager Pop, is played by Wilford Brimley. Brimley is a mere two years older than Redford.
So Redford's casting is a problem. The fact that this supposed baseball movie features some truly ridiculous baseball action doesn't help either. Roy Hobbs joins a terrible team. To show you just how terrible the team is the filmmakers resort to comic baseball, players getting hit in the groin and such. Not funny, not at all. If you want to take this seriously as a baseball movie you're in trouble. There's really nothing believable about the baseball sequences. But if it doesn't work as a baseball movie maybe it at least works as a fable? Not really. The movie beats you over the head with the Roy Hobbs as god stuff but it never really rings true. The fact he's such a dunce surely doesn't help. When a woman from Roy's past shows up she has a secret for him. But she doesn't come right out and say it, she only hints at it. But anybody could figure it out. Anybody except dear old Roy. He doesn't get it. He never seems to get it, no matter what "it" is, unless it's hitting a baseball. That he can do and with remarkable precision, able to hit faraway objects and make them explode whenever the mood strikes him. The character of Roy Hobbs never really works and thus the movie never really works. Redford's acting is fine even if he never looks the part. Many other performers, most notably Robert Duvall and Glenn Close are really wasted, not given enough to do in this totally Roy Hobbs-centered movie. Kim Basinger has a bit more substantial part to play but doesn't really do all that well with it. The film has a great look and sound to it, with beautiful cinematography and a wonderful Randy Newman score. But the story lets the movie down. It's a fable which falls flat, not particularly believable and often, as the movie drags along, not particularly interesting or entertaining. This baseball movie leaves you longing for a real baseball movie.