Soaring Classic, But What's With the Women?

Rating: Null/10 (10 April 2004)

Granted, this is a family film -- the kind of thing dads take their six year old sons to. The baseball scenes are stunning, the music soars, Redford looks golden. But you know, a closer look shows a number of weird mixed messages in the sexual subtext of the film.
Roy Hobbs is in love with innocent farm girl Iris. Okay. But on the train to the Big City, Hobbs meets a BAD GIRL. Oh, she's bad all right. You can tell because she's poised, intelligent, book-smart, and interested in sex. That spells evil, right? Women should be at home making apple pie, not riding in trains and reading books and talking to strange men, right? Who wrote this stuff, Osama Bin Laden?
So Roy goes to lovely Harriet Bird's hotel room, and she SHOOTS HIM WITH A GUN! See what happens when women have too much power? Bet you can't guess where the bullet hits, can you? Symbolic castration time!
Okay. Fifteen years later. Hobbs is back from the dead, (think Bela Lugosi meets Horatio Alger) and wins a second chance with the last place New York Knights. The moment he signs with the team, he meets a BAD GIRL! Kim Basinger is bad girl #2. You can tell "Memo" is bad, bad, bad because she's "not waiting for true love to come along." In other words, she expects to have the same adult freedoms Roy Hobbs has always enjoyed -- like walking into strange people's hotel rooms for sex.
So one night Memo comes into Hobb's hotel room unannounced, drops her mink coat, and gives him plenty to look at. Now stop and think. Hobbs is the golden boy, the hero, right? If he's morally superior to the loose woman, this is the time to say, "young lady, get out of my room! And put some clothes on this instant!" Does he do that? NO!!! He simply stares at her with dead, zombied out eyes, and then they do the deed. Well, if they both do it together, how come SHE is the evil temptress and HE is the helpless victim? Who wrote this stuff, St. Augustine?
Okay, so the moment Hobbs starts having sex with Memo, his bat starts to droop. I mean his batting average declines. What, she's draining his vital bodily fluids? Hobbs starts coming on like General Jack D. Ripper in DR STRANGELOVE: "I don't avoid women, Mandrake. But I do deny them my essence. I don't allow them to sap my pure bodily fluids."
Fortunately, at this point Iris, the GOOD GIRL reappears. Apparently she has lived a chaste, sexless life for fifteen years, while Hobbs was having sex with a long, long string of "bad girls." Now she's ready to take care of him and make apple pies back on the farm? Who wrote this stuff? I mean, like WHO?