July 19, 2010: The Natural
The Natural (1984) is one of those modern-day classic films that everyone is supposed to love. Well, I’m sorry, but I don’t. I was predisposed to not liking this, since I don’t generally like the era (1920s-1940s) and I’m not the world’s biggest Robert Redford fan. As far as I know, I’ve seen this film before, but I didn’t recall anything about it.
The story centres around Redford as Roy Hobbs, a man who has lived and loved baseball for his entire life. He made his own baseball bat from the wood of a tree struck down by lightning when he was a child, and christened it Wonderboy. A freak turn of events, just as he is starting his baseball career, sidelines him for over 20 years before he limps back into the game on a struggling major league team which is an obvious stand-in for the New York Yankees. The woman he was going to marry, the sports cartoonist who makes the connection to his earlier career, and a mysterious team owner known as “The Judge” populate this world in which Roy Hobbs keeps on coming back no matter what the world throws at him. Of course there’s the championship game at the end in which Hobbs needs to overcome the odds and save the day.
There’s plenty more detail to the plot, but it’s difficult to explain. There’s far more to The Natural than just the surface storyline, from the near-supernatural athletic abilities of Hobbs to the mysterious uplifting power of the woman in white and the menace of The Judge who lives his entire existence in darkness. It’s a strange tale, and after struggling for a while to take it at face value I came to the realization that it would be easier to understand if I instead thought of it as a fable. Hobbs never talks about himself or where he came from, his Wonderboy bat seems to be magical, and the symbolism around good and evil and this prophet (of baseball) is so obvious that even I got it.
I watched the director’s cut of The Natural, which has a reworked opening half hour, not that I have any point of comparison. It’s directed by Barry Levinson, who had recently directed Diner (1982) and would go on to win an Oscar for Rain Man (1988). Levinson is a director whose style I’ve never really been able to distinguish (aside from his films commonly being set in Baltimore, but then so are those of John Waters), though I generally like his movies. I’ve been recently thinking about revisiting Tin Men (1987), a comedy set in the 1960s about aluminum siding salesmen. In The Natural, there’s a solid surrounding cast including Glenn Close, Robert Duvall, Wilford Brimley, Barbara Hershey, and Robert Prosky. It’s an intricate period production, surprisingly handed to sophomore director Levinson at a time when Redford was riding high from his own directing Oscar win for Ordinary people (1980). The Natural is adored by many and often claimed as the greatest baseball movie of all time. I like baseball but I don’t love it, and perhaps that’s why this peculiar story with its admittedly impressive presentation didn’t quite speak to me.
Legendary sports film leaves me wanting.
Post a Comment