The movie opens with a kid playing casual baseball with his dad, and being told he "has a gift." Then the father dies, and a giant storm knocks down a tree. The son takes the wood and fashions ... WONDERBOY. The most famous baseball bat in cinema! Probably the only named one, too.
As a kid playing baseball in the '80s, WONDERBOY (yes, it always must be spelled in all caps) was mythic in the extreme. I knew several kids who earned their woodburning badge in Boy Scouts carving some similar name into their own store-bought Louisville Sluggers. Don Mattingly edition bat? Hell, no. Those bats were "Slaughterbat" or "Home Runn" or just a bunch of lightning bolts and crosses and stuff.
Sadly, as The Natural makes clear, if you name a bat something special it better be made from a damned supertree downed by superlightning in a superstorm right after someone superdies. Anything less and you just got a bat from Dick's Sporting Goods with some charring on it.
Roy Hobbs, our hero, is played by Robert Redford in one of his more/less iconic roles. The movie proper begins when he is challenged to strike out The Whammer - a major league star modeled clearly after Babe Ruth - at a country fair. The Whammer is portrayed by Joe Don Baker, who is perfect for the role. Witness to the whole event is Robert Duvall, who is actually pretty poorly cast as sportswriter Max Mercy.
Hobbs makes his way to the big leagues ... but not before he is shot and almost killed by Barbara Hersey, in an incident sadly modeled on the real life shooting of baseball player Eddie Waitkus by obsessed fan Ruth Ann Steinhagen in 1949. Once in the big leagues, he experiences some doldrums before finally earning his true fate as a megahero in the final moments. The ending of the book is ... significantly different, and much better.
The movie is long, too long, at 137 minutes. Yet it's not because it throws everything into the pot - on the contrary, many scenes just drag on and on. Poorly directed is our conclusion here, by Barry Levinson. Levinson is very well known for Diner, Young Sherlock Holmes, Tin Men, Good Morning Vietnam, Rain Man, Avalon, Bugsy, Toys (!), Sleepers, Wag the Dog, and a few others. Needless to say, he is capable of making good movies ... but this one somehow just doesn't mesh well.
It has its moments - Hobbs hits the hide right off the ball; Hobbs knocks out the scoreboard; Hobbs' tryout where every ball seems to go 600 feet; etc. But all in all, there is FAR too much slow motion footage of strikeouts or homeruns or strikes or swings etc. You can really tell that Redford doesn't know the first thing about baseball and they are desperately trying to cover this up with clever cuts which come across as sad and stupid.
Most intriguing is that the story is pretty closely based on the legends of King Arthur, and specifically Sir Percival. The broken bat = broken sword, Pop Fisher = Fisher King, the team is called The Knights, etc etc etc. (thanks to IMDB for the aforementioned examples). But the movie plays this a little too heavily and in-your-face, and the movie doesn't need it.
Instead, the movie does best when it has Big Moments. Hobbs impressing Pop to get on the team. Hobbs and any of his various famous home runs. Etc. I wonder if maybe the 137 minutes are due to so much damned slow motion to accentuate all the Big Sports Moments.
Great tidbit - during the moments when they show Hobbs making the headlines, the copy beneath the headlines isn't about baseball but, instead, bass fishing, a religious service, and a New York Giant fan (thanks again to IMBC trivia).
But despite my complaints, it's still regarded as a pretty good movie, and I guess it is, in a way. I was ruined after reading the book, which treats things much differently and more realistically. The film embiggens everything, but at great cost.
I recommend The Natural, and it's one of the better non-comedy baseball movies out there, but it's no Eight Men Out (next to be reviewed) or Bull Durham (also coming soon).
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