What is past, or passing, or to come.

Rating: 6/10 (27 June 2013)

It's a movie about Clint Eastwood, baseball scout for one of the major league teams, sent to North Carolina to bid competitively for the services of an arrogant young slugger. He's joined by his estranged daughter, Amy Adams, who grew up with baseball but has just been offered a partnership in her law firm back in Atlanta.
Will the managers take Eastwood's advice to pass the slugger up, or will they go with the statistics and hire him? Eastwood is going blind and can hardly read his own name, but his knowledgeable daughter serves as his eyes. (Clintwood has his own ears and can use them instrumentally.) The firm wants her back in the city to make an important presentation to a client, and she's working her butt off to polish it up, but she feels that Dad needs her here in the sticks. Will she abrogate her professional responsibilities and see this conundrum through with Eastwood, who keeps telling her to beat it? It's all very tense.
Eastwood's later work has always been leisurely and here it's even more so, with its focus on father and daughter, and baseball and jobs important subjects but minor. There are plenty of scenes in which people sit around and talk over bottles of beer. There really isn't much baseball involved, and practically nothing about the way a scout exercises his skills. Dad hates computers and all that robotical crap. He can tell whether a boy can hit from the way the ball sounds when it whops into the catcher's glove. But how he does it, how he can tell, remains a mystery.
Amy Adams' performance isn't bad. She's kind of cute, with that upturned nose of hers. And she's of a proper age to play Eastwood's daughter, in her early thirties, a graduate of law school, and an established career. If she were ten years younger it would make us wonder about Eastwood, who has aged quite a bit in the past few years, since, say, "The Changeling." It's not just that he LOOKS older. His voice has been reduced from an aging gargle to a hoarse whisper. It's depressing to see him soldiering on and yet it evokes our sympathy for the character -- and for Eastwood. "An aged man is but a paltry thing, A tattered coat upon a stick, unless Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing For every tatter in its mortal dress." Eastwood handles the role as an angry egotist in professional decline, but it's quietly moving. It's not a great movie, not exceptionally good, but, in a way, it doesn't have to be.