Natural sinner become winner

Rating: 8/10 (20 January 2013)

Being Scottish, my acquaintance with live baseball is limited to attending three separate games while on holiday in the States and Canada, but there's something about the history of this almost uniquely American game (oddly enough, I'm also a keen fan of its nearest UK equivalent, cricket) which fascinates me and led me to recently watching in its entirety Ken Burns' extensive TV history of the sport.
So, knowing just enough about the sport to get by, I settled down to enjoy this excellent baseball-themed movie and enjoy it I did. Directed in a fashion that aptly recalls classic Hollywood story-telling of the 20's and 30's, it relates its fable of the rise, fall and rise again of "The Natural", the man with no past, Roy Hobbs, played handsomely, in more ways than one by Robert Redford. Only of course we do know his past, as shown in the prologue which introduces Hobbs and his exceptional talent, brutally curtailed following a moral misjudgement, the outcome of which delays his entry to the big league by some 17 years.
Luckily, Redford can carry off looking 20 as required in the first 15 minutes, when he first shows his talent, albeit in pitching, with an encounter with a thinly disguised Babe Ruth, played with gusto by Joe Don Baker. When he returns years later to make his destiny in the sport, he comes across the usual distractions of sleazy journalism, shady financiers and of course, loose women, before he gets a wake-up call just in time from his true love and gives the ending the story deserves, even as I understand it contradicts that of the source novel.
Shot in appropriately golden light and strongly played by most of the principals, the only weak link being Kim Basinger as the scheming sex-pot out to turn his head, this is an exciting and emotionally engaging story. Perhaps the villains of the piece could have been drawn a shade darker and Robert Duvall is slightly underused as the scheming journalist scenting a story, but a young Glenn Close is just right as the grown-up girl Hobbs left behind, whose eleventh-hour revelation inspires his final act.
Director Levinson pulls out the stops for the big set-piece climaxes on the field as Redford serves up the clichés of "hitting the cover off the ball" and "stopping the clocks", before literally "lighting the lights" at the conclusion. He thus invests the sport with the near-mythical symbolism its devoted supporters claim as its due and I for one am not about to deny them.
In a crowded market-place, this has to be one of the best sporting films ever, while I hold my breath waiting for a major movie about cricket.