The Natural
Release Date: 1984
Ebert Rating: **
By Roger Ebert / Jan 1, 1984

Why didn't they make a baseball picture? Why did THE NATURAL have to be turned into idolatry on behalf of Robert Redford? Why did a perfectly good story, filled with interesting people, have to be made into one man's ascension to the godlike, especially when no effort is made to give that ascension meaning? And were the most important people in the god-man's life kept mostly offscreen so they wouldn't upstage him?

Let's begin at the end of THE NATURAL. Redford plays Roy Hobbs, a middle-aged ballplayer making his comeback. It's the last out of the last inning of the crucial play-off game, and everything depends on him. He's been in a slump. Can his childhood sweetheart, Iris Gaines (Glenn Close), snap him out of it? She sends him a note revealing that her child is his son. The fact that he has not already figured this out is incredible. But he is inspired by the revelation. He steps to the plate. He has been having some trouble with his stomach. Some trouble, all right. A stain of blood spreads on his baseball shirt. It's a pretty badly bleeding stomach when it bleeds right through the skin. Roy swats a homer that hits the lights, and they all explode into fireworks, showering fiery stars upon him as he makes the rounds. In the epilogue, Roy plays catch with Iris and their son -- a son who has not been allowed a single onscreen word -- and a woman whose role has been to sit in the stands, wreathed in ethereal light, and inspire him.

Come on, give us a break. The last shot is cheap and phony. Either he hits the homer and then dies, or his bleeding was just a false alarm. If the bleeding was a false alarm, then everything else in the movie was false, too. But I guess that doesn't matter, because THE NATURAL gives every sign of a story that's been seriously meddled with. Redford has been placed so firmly in the foreground that the prime consideration is to show him in a noble light. The people in his life -- baseball players, mistresses, gamblers, crooks, sportswriters -- seem grateful to share the frame with him. In case we miss the point, Redford is consistently backlit to turn his golden hair into a saintly halo.

THE NATURAL could have been a decent movie. One reason that it is not: Of all its characters, the only one we don't want to know more about is Roy Hobbs. I'd love to get to know Pop Fisher (Wilford Brimley), the cynical, old team manager. Robert Duvall, as the evil sportswriter, Max Mercy, has had his part cut so badly that we only know he's evil because he practically tells us. Richard Farnsworth, as a kindly coach, has a smile that's more genuine than anything else in the movie. But you have to look quick. And what's with Glenn Close? She's the childhood sweetheart who doesn't hear from Roy after an accident changes the course of his life. Then she turns up years later, and when she stands up in the bleachers she is surrounded by blinding light: "Our Lady of Extra Innings." In the few moments she's allowed alone with Roy, she strikes us as complicated, tender, and forgiving. But even the crucial fact of her life -- that she has borne this man's son -- is used as a plot gimmick. If THE NATURAL were about human beings and not a demigod, Glenn Close and Robert Redford would have spoken together, in the same room, using real words, about their child. Not in this movie.

As for the baseball, the movie isn't even subtle. When a team is losing, it makes Little League errors. When it's winning, the hits are so accurate they even smash the bad guy's windows. There's not a second of real baseball strategy in the whole film. The message is: Baseball is purely and simply a matter of divine intervention. At about the 130-minute mark, I got the idea that God's only begotten son was playing right field for the New York team. [Emphasis added]

Sports Illustrated

"The Natural: hit or myth? Whether you like this fantasy may depend on how well you know baseball"

By Frank Deford
Issue date: May 21, 1984

The first half hour of The Natural is simply beautiful, not only in the richness of the film and the texture of the story, but also in all that it evokes of the pastoral Americana diamondiana of our fathers. One scene in particular, in which the title character, played by Robert Redford, engages in an impromptu baseball duel with a Ruthian rival, may be as fine an interlude as we've ever witnessed in any film about sport. The characters, whether broad or finely drawn, are all well within themselves, and the tale is spun out in the most engaging way. We are captivated.

And then, out of the blue, when Redford slugs one, the horsehide breaks open and the innards unravel. Get it? He literally knocks the cover off the ball. Pause, please, for stage guffaws. Not long afterward, one of Redford's teammates is killed going into the wall after a fly ball, and this, too, is treated as a belly laugh. The extraordinary surface tension, so lovingly created by director Barry Levinson, is shattered, and I felt used -- cheated to the degree that I never really trusted the movie again.

As Ron Fimrite pointed out in his recent story on Redford and the film, Bernard Malamud's novel, whence cometh the movie, is "confounding in its switches from mythology to realism, from sports-page jargon to lyricism." What may work in print for a master novelist, however, won't necessarily succeed in a visual medium. The Natural's transmutations are too jarring, and, in the end, they turn the film's realism against it.

That's the constitutional failing of The Natural, and while all else may seem like nitpicking, the movie is otherwise blemished by an interminable last act that deteriorates into melodrama, as first one villain and then another struts across the screen. Redford, the only benign male character of any substance in the story, is beset by a surfeit of catalogue nasties, including an evil owner, a fixer, a blonde siren and a conniving sportswriter (a hackneyed part on which the Academy Award-winning talents of Robert Duvall are wasted). The team Redford stars for is the New York Knights; because of the film's grand excesses, the way The Natural was put together reminds me more of how the New York Yankees were assembled -- in the manner of more is less.

What separates The Natural from the Steinbrenners, however, is spirit and effort. The devotion that colors the project is everywhere in evidence, starting with an attention to detail that all but reincarnates the National Pastime of the '30s. The use of period newspaper headlines to move a story along is a hoary device, but it was never more artfully applied. The clothes, the language (when was the last time you heard someone say "swell"?), the trains, the poses and, above all, the lighting are exquisite. Special credit must also be given to Satan, for surely none but Beelzebub himself could preserve the 46-year-old Redford in a way that must make even Joan Collins green with envy. And, as we saw in The Sting, Redford can wear a fedora better than any other man alive.

He invests the mysterious Roy Hobbs with a proper enough mixture of humor and distance as he wends his way through a maze of allegories. Surely, it must not be easy being, in succession, Rapid Robert Feller, Sir Lancelot, Eddie Waitkus, Captain Marvel, Shoeless Joe Jackson, Casey of Mudville and General Hospital. Unfortunately, Redford exhibits a certain self-consciousness in part and never deigns to really play Hobbs -- reflecting, perhaps, his own superstar complex.

Glenn Close, as The First Love, is a most beguiling presence. When she rises in the crowd at Wrigley Field, an Ophelia in white, shimmering like the lady who holds up the flame at Columbia Pictures, I was perfectly at ease with that kind of mythology.

So perhaps one man's myth is another man's prison. For many, it might be quite possible to enjoy this film on both its levels, but my own devotion to baseball prohibits me from accepting what the non-fan can swallow with ease. As a romanticist, I can believe that love conquers all, the check's in the mail and girls just wanna have fun -- beam me up, Scotty -- but, damn it, baseballs can only be hit so far and ballplayers can only hit them just so often. Trick around with that and nothing else of mere human emotions and values can be accepted, either. Possibly this is one baseball film that will be appreciated more by people who don't know baseball than by those who do. We shall see. Still, though it overreaches and postures, The Natural almost manages to be a swell movie. [Emphasis added]

then everything else in the movie was false, too.

My favorite part of the movie

Wait....46 year old people don't bat .490 and slug .800?

Memo to bobm, Roger and Frank: IT'S A FREAKIN' MOVIE, NOT A DOCUMENTARY!

Suspension of disbelief seems selective for some.

She did spend 3 years in a mental hospital which if I had to guess was entirely appropriate in a legal sense.*

My favorite part of the movie is that Wilford Brimley, who played the manager, is 2 years older than Redford.

The movie would have been better if they showed the scene of Redford knocking up Close.

Hate the main character? You just admitted you were a definite minority. A literary legacy doesn't rest on a few aberrant reactions...

But, all that still doesn't answer the question. Why do you hate it and what does that have to do with literary achievement?

Memo to bobm, Roger and Frank: IT'S A FREAKIN' MOVIE, NOT A DOCUMENTARY!

"It's a freakin' movie" can be used to defend The Day the Clown Cried.

"It's a freakin' movie" can be used to defend The Day the Clown Cried.



I don't see how; has anyone ever seen it?

I didn't say anything about its literary legacy. Neither did snapper, for that matter. Why did I hate it? I can only report that my 14 year old self disliked it, and that he hated Holden Caulfield.

My guess is that if I read it again today, I would still think that Caulfield was an annoying "phony" brat, but maybe I'd see him as more of an antihero and I'd enjoy the book more. At the time, I didn't enjoy it at all.

Is it possible that Catcher's appeal is more generational? I read it for the first time somewhat recently and was really underwhelmed, but at the same time could see how the main character might be more interesting or provocative 50-60 years ago, but compared to a lot of modern teen angst anti-hero types he seems really tame.

Some rather repellent main characters that most readers nevertheless feel for

That's why I asked you. It's called furthering a conversation.

But if you're going to reflexively go into defense mode, forget it.

I would say that there few classics where all the characters are widely hated, and that applies to Catcher in the Rye. You and snapper aren’t “widely”.

Hamlet (in that will you EVER make a decision for Christ's Sake, Jesus ****! sort of way)

what would Shakespeare have filled Acts IV and V with? :-)