The Natural
A Garland Briefer Than A Girl’s
The time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high.
It seems like forever ago, but there was a moment when Juan Gonzalez was the biggest hero the Texas Rangers had ever seen. It was Game One of the 1996 AL division series, and the Rangers were playing their first-ever post-season game in Yankee Stadium. Gonzalez hit a blast down the left field line that gently curled inside the foul pole to clinch the win for the Rangers over the hated Bronx Bombers. The Yankees would come back and win Game Two, despite some more Gonzalez heroics, but with the last three games of the series at the Ballpark, Rangers fans were smelling blood. The slogan was “The Hunt for Red October”, and Gonzalez was “Senor Octubre”.
This lasted for all of two games, as the mighty Yankee steamroller bulldozed the Rangers — who would go on to lose to the Yankees in three straight in ‘98 and ‘99, scoring two runs in six games. Gonzalez, a Detroit Tiger until the trading deadline, is now best known for his refusal to play in the 1999 Hall of Fame Game in Cooperstown because of an ill-fitting uniform. Goodbye, Senor Octubre, hello, Senor Baggypants.
Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honors out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man.
Robert Redford knows that glory is fleeting, more so that most. By 1984, his once-bright star had faded. He’d had two flops previously, 1980’s forgettable Brubaker and 1979’s The Electric Horseman (although, he’d scored his only Oscar for directing Ordinary People in 1980). The attraction of the Roy Hobbs part in The Natural is obvious; like Hobbs, Redford was looking for one more shot at greatness. And like Hobbs, he finds it.
So set, before the echoes fade,
The fleet foot on the sill of shade,
And hold to the low lintel up
The still-defended challenge-cup.
The Natural is the tale of Roy Hobbs, a can’t-miss slugger derailed by a silver bullet who wanders into the big leagues looking for one last shot at glory. He finds his chance with the decrepit New York Knights, who are rattling around Buffalo’s ancient War Memorial Stadium like dice in a cup. Hobbs moves in and begins covering himself in glory, hitting home run after home run to lead the Knights to the brink of the NL championship.
Usually, you’ll say that a complex character in a movie is “many things”. Roy Hobbs is only one thing in this movie; an icon. Fortunately, this plays to Redford’s strong suit, and he handles the role of icon well. (All except for a ludicrous scene, early on, where he foolishly plays the young Roy Hobbs.)
In fact, if you run down the list of characters, mostly what you’ll see is icons. Glenn Close as the Woman in White, certainly has an iconic aspect. So does Kim Basinger as the Woman in Red. Ditto Wilford Brimley and Richard Farnsworth in the dugout. There’s really only one acting performance in the movie, which unsurprisingly goes to the best actor of the lot: Robert Duvall as sportswriter Max Mercy, who we like in spite of ourselves.
No, there’s not much to recommend about the acting. I didn’t think there was much to like about the script, either, until I read the original Malamud novel. The writers did an excellent job of sanding off some of the story’s rougher edges, transporting the story back in time a few decades, for one, and making the slugger’s affair with Close into a wistful romance instead of a cheap rendezvous, and translating the multiple quirky superstitions of the team into a lightning-bolt patch. Their wisest move is to turn the health crisis that faces Hobbs at the end of the movie into a result of his earlier wounding from the silver bullet instead of a run-in with some bad seafood.
Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay,
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.
What does recommend The Natural, what transforms it beyond its heritage, is its love of baseball and its devotion to glory. Say what you want about the Malamud novel, but no one can argue that it was written out of love and gratitude to the Great Game. Barry Levinson — a denizen of one of the world’s great baseball towns — has that love and that devotion, and it shines through every frame of The Natural. The Natural picks up every beauty spot of the great green cathedrals of baseball, and everything from the gorgeous Knights uniforms to the breathless newsreel footage bespeaks a passion for the game.
Some of the trendy Hollywood Left theorized (after one of their own, Steven Spielberg, made Saving Private Ryan) that you can’t make a true anti-war movie, that war is so inherently cinematically interesting and exciting and offering so much in the way of love and heroism and courage and sacrifice that all war movies are pro-war. Be that as it may, I don’t think that you can make an anti-baseball movie, either; the greatness of the game transcends all Hollywood efforts to muck it up.
But the real attraction in The Natural is glory. Say what you will about the ending (fans of the book will be disheartened), the towering, climactic scenes of this movie cover themselves in glory. The arc of the ball, the shower of sparks, the Randy Newman crescendoes, the players celebrating in the starlight, all of these things denote glory on a scale that only the big screen can bring us. It is, at last, this glorious firework of joy that ends the movie that cements The Natural’s reputation as one of the great sports films of all time.
And round that early-laurelled head
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,
And find to unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl’s.
– A.E. Houseman, “To An Athlete Dying Young”