Generic, overly sentimental ball movie

Rating: Null/10 (21 June 2013)

Like most baseball flicks, "The Natural" is a mawkish, overly sentimental sports movie. Typical of the genre, it's filmed with a gauzy, nostalgic tone, spends most of its running time romanticising the game and indulges in a number of hokey, metaphysical subplots which attempt to lend a vaguely spiritual or mythical air to one of America's favourite religions. Thank director Barry Levinson for all this.
Thank actor Robert Redford for everything else. Redford, who plays a hotshot ball player in the film, was known for a number of counterculture projects which attempted social critique. This one, "The Natural", goes out of its way to sketch an America full of schemers, back-stabbers and money grubbing profiteers who destroy lives, families and the "spirit of the game". The juxtaposition between the film's two poles thus results in its best quality, a love-hate relationship which Redford's character eventually grows tired of and rejects. The film's final shots echo its first, fathers and sons playing ball with fathers and sons. Almost all of Redford's films during this period had the same philosophical arc: frustration followed by cynical, reflexive impotency and then disconnection; abandon the game or play it on your terms.
Levinson has never been particularly strong with visuals. "The Natural" is filled with clichés, overuses slow motion and is very heavy-handed throughout. In Levinson's defence, such things were new at the time, and in many ways "the Natural" was a trend-setter which set in stone what we now take to be genre clichés. The film co-stars the always wonderful Richard Farnsworth.
6/10 - See "Bull Durham" and "Moneyball".