It's riddled with cliches... so why is it so good?

Rating: 9/10 (31 August 2002)

On the face of it this movie should have a boat-load of problems. It's long (runtime 127 minutes). It's a potentially unweildy two movies in one--the story of a team in a town with no baseball becoming a winning team, and the story of Jim Morris' amazing rise to the Major Leagues at the age of 35. It contains many long sequences that are very... pastoral... to put the best face on them (and maybe they actually deserve that treatment--they are slow, but beautiful). It's a Disney movie--usually the kiss of death towards any hope of true depth. It's a "based on a true story" movie, with some definite revisionist history in it.
And that's just the start of it. The movie contains more cliches and stereotypes than you can shake a stick at. A boy with a stern father who doesn't understand his son's impractical love of baseball. A main character who is "haunted by demons" and has to overcome them. An beleagered understanding wife, but with undercurrents that marital discord is just waiting in the wings. The local team that doesn't have a chance to win, but they do. I could go on with the list for much longer.
But "The Rookie" is more than the sum of its parts.
First there is a performance from Dennis Quaid that is probably the best of his career. It's sensitive. It's longing. His version of Jim Morris is one of those rare portrayals of a quiet man, with much more going on behind his eyes than in front of them. If you loved Quaid in "Frequency", it's a similar type of performance, but maybe a bit better.
Quaid is much older than Morris really was at the time, but it gives Morris a "lived in" look which only helps. Quaid is a man who is rarely given a chance to act--for real I mean--in most of the movies which come his way, and somehow things just fell into place this time.
But the movie works for other reasons as well. It has the mish-mash of cliches, but it never revels or wallows in them. At most they are bricks and not mortar---elements used to build a better whole, but the filmmakers weren't foolish enough to use weak glue to hold it all together.
The glue is that the film loves and respects its subject matter. It's not a half-assed attempt which uses baseball as a plot device for another story--it's about baseball. It's also about Morris, and his wife, and his Dad, and his Mom, and his team, and his town, but baseball is the thread which links them all. Jim Morris is a true believer--obsessed with the game--and so is this film, in a good way.
All of the cliches--the bricks--and held solid in this foundation. As are they by Quaid's performance. Rachel Griffiths, also is good--in a role brief enough that she could have just phoned it in--but she doesn't.

Give it a shot.
Oh... and its even got a decent soundtrack, if you aren't offended by older folk-like country, as opposed to the newer garbage they crank out these days.