Spectacular Catch by Levinson!

Rating: 7/10 (3 October 2002)

I don't know why I enjoy this movie as much as I do. I haven't cared about baseball much since I was ten years old and this isn't Redford's best performance.
Let me get the weaknesses out of the way first. The story is an ur-sports one. Act One: Prodigy is discovered. Act Two: Tragedy leads to slump. Act Three: Protagonist overcomes demons and wins the game (or bout, or chukkar, or whatever). Subordinate characters are largely quirky stereotypes.
There is an over-obvious mythological overlay that's more pretentious than anything else. During dramatic moments, the score swells to heroic proportions to an extent that we almost expect a cut to Moses's parting of the Red Sea. The slow-motion not only signals a triumph in the making but allows us to relish it for a few seconds longer.
Let's see. I guess that about covers most of the reasons not to like the film. But these flaws are pretty much overcome by its virtues. When the score isn't alter-casting us as worshipers it has a nice slangy period feel to it.
During the periods of defeat the score never becomes maudlin. It retains a kind of tinkly offhand quality but sounds a bit slower in tempo, imbued with a hardly noticeable melancholy. The photography is first rate. It has the same tawny quality that has cropped up in lesser works like "The Fortune" or "W. C. Fields and Me." Everyone seems burnished by the sun. There is an early scene, shot late in the afternoon, in which tiny, white, feathery pappus drift slowly in the air like motes, and each figure wears a golden nimbus. When Glenn Close needs to be inspirational, she stands upright and is engulfed in a mandriole of gilded flame, a little overdone.And the period detail is evocative without being obtrusive. A slow-motion shot of a dying flashbulb signals the beginning of Redford's career slump. The light-bulb-as-career works well, as it did for Scorcese and for Orson Welles in "Citizen Kane." The lighting and photography are warm and welcoming and exceptionally skillful.
The story follows the three-act pattern, except that it doubles it by giving us two tragedies instead of one, so you get twice as much for your money, and Hobbs has double the number of demons to cope with. (First he gets shot -- in a theme I must say I didn't completely understand -- then he falls for Lillith instead of whoever the muse of the game of baseball is.)
The acting? As I say, Redford in the central role is a bit too minimized, or maybe it's the wrong kind of role for him, although he looks the part of the fit athlete perfectly -- sinuously muscled instead of bulging all over with sarcomeres. Of course his real background in baseball must have helped his physical performance. He looks right. I wish he had projected a little more concern about his slump. He's pretty casual about the whole thing. "Whatever's wrong, it's not the bat," he shrugs.
Glenn Close is good, as usual, although surely such companions don't exist. Kim Basinger, later to be my co-star, looks ravishing. Duval, another co-star, turns in his usual superior performance, an arid chuckle, smiling, his mouth open, villainous. The other players are equally good, locked as some are into one-dimensional roles. I particularly enjoy the pizazz that Darren McGavin brings to his part of the antagonistic gambler. It's his best role in years. He's philosophical about losing, charming, full of casual jokes. The restaurant scene in which he pops out his eye is amusing and slightly frightening at the same time.
The judge, despite his greed and underhandedness, is amusing too. He speaks in the pompous Gongoristic prose you'd expect from someone who used to sit on the bench and is accustomed to demonstrating how superior he is to most mortals. "A canard -- a pure canard." Brimley and Farnsworth are a pair of aces as they try to deal with the newly arrived middle-aged rookie, or sit together on the bench while each tries to name the song the other is humming. (This was a touch added by Levinson when he noticed the two of them doing it between takes.)
Yes, it has all those weaknesses. But it's the kind of movie that doesn't repay much analysis. Anybody up for deconstructing "Duck Soup"? It's extremely easy to sit back and be drawn into this story because it is, in so many ways, admirably done.