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In a sentence: A preternaturally talented player emerges from nowhere.
There's a difference between story and myth. Stories are full of people, and people have to overcome challenges. Myths are full of emblems and inevitabilities. Stories are about the journey, but myths are about how they end.
The Natural is a myth.
Contra nearly every other sports movie, which is about a ragtag group of whatevers that learn to work together, Roy Hobbs (the titular "natural") doesn't really have to overcome anything, and he doesn't really need anyone else's help. Sure, there are obstacles, in the way a toddler clinging to your leg is an obstacle. But they exist only to be run over (the obstacles, not the toddlers).
To be fair, the movie announces its intentions almost immediately: after a brief opener where he plays catch with his father (more on that later), we jump forward to said father's death. The same night he dies, a tree outside their farmhouse is struck by lightning. Roy takes some wood from the broken tree and fashions a bat out of it, which he names "Wonderboy." He even carves a lightning bolt into the barrel. He is the baseball Prometheus, given a gift by the Gods and then gracing the rest of humanity with it. Within minutes he's striking out the best ballplayer in the country in an impromptu roadside challenge. This is obviously fantastical, but it's especially so for baseball, which is famously hard to dominate. It's a precise, strategic game where excellence is a mix of physical ability and experience; most players hit their peak at least several years into their career.
The only way in which he resembles a real person is that he's kind of a jerk, in keeping with what you'd expect both from someone whose success is immediate and effortless, and with what we know of the dispostitions of the most competitive athletes. He talks about wanting to break every record, and when someone asks him "and then?" he's left only to more or less reiterate this desire.
Emblems still have needs, I suppose, because he finds himself involved with several women. The first is Glenn Close, a childhood sweetheart. The second is a stalker who shoots him. The third is Kim Basinger, a bookie's girl who tries to manipulate him but sure seems to have fallen for him in the process.
Basinger's presence is appropriate, because Roy Hobbs is essentially what you'd get if you turned James Bond into a baseball player. Most men are threatened by him, and most women love him. He has a pithy rejoinder for everything and is unflappable. He has struggles, but they largely consist of a) self-inflicted distractions and b) literally getting shot. The shooter is the aforementioned stalker (in an event drawn from real life). But you can't kill a myth, so all it does is slow him down. We jump forward 16 years and he enters the majors around what should be the end of his career.
It's tiring listening to the gamblers or the managers or the journalists come at him verbally only for him to swat them down with something that we're apparently meant to find clever or quick-witted, but which mostly boil down to "I don't care."
Hobbs has to fight his way onto the team because he's old and because that's one of the few ways a perfect character can be made to face adversity, I guess. As soon as he gets his chance he supplants the normal right fielder (who literally dies, in the most dramatic Wally Pipping imaginable) and takes the league by storm. He struggles at some point, but it's never because he's not good enough or overmatched by the competition. His failures are all self-inflicted, down to personal distraction. He even blames himself for getting shot, saying that he should've seen it coming. He can only be defeated by himself.
There are, we learn, some lingering effects of the shooting. The wound is, of course, on his abdomen, because in addition to being emblematic of Greek myth, he's apparently Baseball Jesus, too. I hasten to add that the wound is on the wrong side, but this is presumably because he's left-handed. I will not be fielding questions about whether God is ambidextrous.
One of the bigger flaws here, in something that echoes the obligatory romantic subplot stuff discussed elsewhere, is that the film kind of tries to have it both ways. The childhood sweetheart stuff is there just to throw a curveball later in the film, when that sweetheart resurfaces and eventually reveals that the teenage boy she's got with her is, of course, his. And after he almost dies trying to play through his injury, we abruptly flash forward at the end to show him playing catch with his son in an echo of the film's opening. This is too little, too late in the character department. There isn't any sense throughout the film that he's learning or growing out of his obsession with greatness, or has come to any profound realization about the life he'll have to live after baseball. It's just a superficial reward tacked onto the end of the film, a destination we never saw the journey towards.
Mediocre. The swinging is awkward and fake looking, and Redford runs like his elbows are attached to his sides. But the throws are decent and the movie manages to orient us without having people just read out the score and inning over and over. It conveys the stakes and situations naturally. But yes, it resorts to the classic newspaper headline montage, too. But I find that particular cliché charming.
It's a myth, so of course they do. But how they win is the only reason anybody loves this movie. There are two key elements in the finale that have kept it in memory:
First, the imagery. Hobbs hits a pennant-winning home run into the stadium lights, shattering them and short circuiting the system. The entire sequence is in slow motion, and it ends with Hobbs and his entire team celebrating while sparks rain down on them. It might be the single most beautiful shot in any baseball movie, rivaled only by the shot moments earlier where the entire scene is reflected in the manager's glasses:
Second, the score. The word "iconic" is horrendously overused, but it has never been more apt. The music is pitch-perfect and elevates everything. In the way Maurice Jarre's score for Lawrence of Arabia has become evocative of the desert, Randy Newman's orchestral theme has become synonymous with baseball. When Major League Baseball unveiled its All-Century team at the 1999 All-Star game, they played it throughout:
Note that the intro here is an homage to Field of Dreams. And yet they use the score from The Natural under it. It's status as the definitive example of baseball music is so thorough that they use it in place of the score of other baseball movies.
There's a little audio easter egg I include at the end of all the podcasts I've done for this site. It's from Adaptation. where Brian Cox, playing Robert McKee, says:
One of the most intoxicating things about baseball is the way amazing things can happen at any moment, regardless of circumstance. They can lie in wait during a meaningless blowout between last place teams on a Tuesday afternoon in September. Entire seasons turning on a dime, entire careers bouncing off of pebbles. You have no idea what's coming next. So it's strangely appropriate that The Natural is so well-regarded. Because like so many futile seasons it trudges along out of necessity, only to surprise us with a singular moment whose shadow reaches back across the long summer that led to it.
A swing, and a myth.
The Natural (1984)
In a sentence: A preternaturally talented player emerges from nowhere.
There's a difference between story and myth. Stories are full of people, and people have to overcome challenges. Myths are full of emblems and inevitabilities. Stories are about the journey, but myths are about how they end.
The Natural is a myth.
Contra nearly every other sports movie, which is about a ragtag group of whatevers that learn to work together, Roy Hobbs (the titular "natural") doesn't really have to overcome anything, and he doesn't really need anyone else's help. Sure, there are obstacles, in the way a toddler clinging to your leg is an obstacle. But they exist only to be run over (the obstacles, not the toddlers).
To be fair, the movie announces its intentions almost immediately: after a brief opener where he plays catch with his father (more on that later), we jump forward to said father's death. The same night he dies, a tree outside their farmhouse is struck by lightning. Roy takes some wood from the broken tree and fashions a bat out of it, which he names "Wonderboy." He even carves a lightning bolt into the barrel. He is the baseball Prometheus, given a gift by the Gods and then gracing the rest of humanity with it. Within minutes he's striking out the best ballplayer in the country in an impromptu roadside challenge. This is obviously fantastical, but it's especially so for baseball, which is famously hard to dominate. It's a precise, strategic game where excellence is a mix of physical ability and experience; most players hit their peak at least several years into their career.
The only way in which he resembles a real person is that he's kind of a jerk, in keeping with what you'd expect both from someone whose success is immediate and effortless, and with what we know of the dispostitions of the most competitive athletes. He talks about wanting to break every record, and when someone asks him "and then?" he's left only to more or less reiterate this desire.
Emblems still have needs, I suppose, because he finds himself involved with several women. The first is Glenn Close, a childhood sweetheart. The second is a stalker who shoots him. The third is Kim Basinger, a bookie's girl who tries to manipulate him but sure seems to have fallen for him in the process.
Basinger's presence is appropriate, because Roy Hobbs is essentially what you'd get if you turned James Bond into a baseball player. Most men are threatened by him, and most women love him. He has a pithy rejoinder for everything and is unflappable. He has struggles, but they largely consist of a) self-inflicted distractions and b) literally getting shot. The shooter is the aforementioned stalker (in an event drawn from real life). But you can't kill a myth, so all it does is slow him down. We jump forward 16 years and he enters the majors around what should be the end of his career.
It's tiring listening to the gamblers or the managers or the journalists come at him verbally only for him to swat them down with something that we're apparently meant to find clever or quick-witted, but which mostly boil down to "I don't care."
Hobbs has to fight his way onto the team because he's old and because that's one of the few ways a perfect character can be made to face adversity, I guess. As soon as he gets his chance he supplants the normal right fielder (who literally dies, in the most dramatic Wally Pipping imaginable) and takes the league by storm. He struggles at some point, but it's never because he's not good enough or overmatched by the competition. His failures are all self-inflicted, down to personal distraction. He even blames himself for getting shot, saying that he should've seen it coming. He can only be defeated by himself.
There are, we learn, some lingering effects of the shooting. The wound is, of course, on his abdomen, because in addition to being emblematic of Greek myth, he's apparently Baseball Jesus, too. I hasten to add that the wound is on the wrong side, but this is presumably because he's left-handed. I will not be fielding questions about whether God is ambidextrous.
One of the bigger flaws here, in something that echoes the obligatory romantic subplot stuff discussed elsewhere, is that the film kind of tries to have it both ways. The childhood sweetheart stuff is there just to throw a curveball later in the film, when that sweetheart resurfaces and eventually reveals that the teenage boy she's got with her is, of course, his. And after he almost dies trying to play through his injury, we abruptly flash forward at the end to show him playing catch with his son in an echo of the film's opening. This is too little, too late in the character department. There isn't any sense throughout the film that he's learning or growing out of his obsession with greatness, or has come to any profound realization about the life he'll have to live after baseball. It's just a superficial reward tacked onto the end of the film, a destination we never saw the journey towards.
How's the Baseball?
Mediocre. The swinging is awkward and fake looking, and Redford runs like his elbows are attached to his sides. But the throws are decent and the movie manages to orient us without having people just read out the score and inning over and over. It conveys the stakes and situations naturally. But yes, it resorts to the classic newspaper headline montage, too. But I find that particular cliché charming.
Do They Win?
It's a myth, so of course they do. But how they win is the only reason anybody loves this movie. There are two key elements in the finale that have kept it in memory:
First, the imagery. Hobbs hits a pennant-winning home run into the stadium lights, shattering them and short circuiting the system. The entire sequence is in slow motion, and it ends with Hobbs and his entire team celebrating while sparks rain down on them. It might be the single most beautiful shot in any baseball movie, rivaled only by the shot moments earlier where the entire scene is reflected in the manager's glasses:
Second, the score. The word "iconic" is horrendously overused, but it has never been more apt. The music is pitch-perfect and elevates everything. In the way Maurice Jarre's score for Lawrence of Arabia has become evocative of the desert, Randy Newman's orchestral theme has become synonymous with baseball. When Major League Baseball unveiled its All-Century team at the 1999 All-Star game, they played it throughout:
Note that the intro here is an homage to Field of Dreams. And yet they use the score from The Natural under it. It's status as the definitive example of baseball music is so thorough that they use it in place of the score of other baseball movies.
There's a little audio easter egg I include at the end of all the podcasts I've done for this site. It's from Adaptation. where Brian Cox, playing Robert McKee, says:
"Wow them in the end and you've got a hit. You can have flaws, problems...but wow them in the end, and you've got a hit."That sums up The Natural. It's not a good film, and it doesn't have many interesting characters. But it wows you in the end, and Hobbs got a hit.
One of the most intoxicating things about baseball is the way amazing things can happen at any moment, regardless of circumstance. They can lie in wait during a meaningless blowout between last place teams on a Tuesday afternoon in September. Entire seasons turning on a dime, entire careers bouncing off of pebbles. You have no idea what's coming next. So it's strangely appropriate that The Natural is so well-regarded. Because like so many futile seasons it trudges along out of necessity, only to surprise us with a singular moment whose shadow reaches back across the long summer that led to it.
A swing, and a myth.