But I ought to start out with the thought that I referenced in the subject of this post.
When I started watching the movie, not knowing what the scope of the narrative would entail, I found it laughable that Robert Redford plays his character, the immortal Roy Hobbs, at age 19. Hearing other characters refer to him as "kid" made me laugh. When The Natural was filmed in 1983, Redford was a 47-year-old "kid." Redford makes more sense in the role when the action shifts ahead 16 years, but he's still ten years older than the elder statesman version of Hobbs is supposed to be. It reminded me a bit of John C. Reilly playing his character as a 12-year-old in Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, though in that case the laughs were intentional.
I went almost immediately from laughing at this to feeling really poignant about it.
You see, I am also a 47-year-old trying to play baseball.
I'm not sure how much I've told you about this on here, but not only am I a huge baseball fan, I'm also a player. Yeah, I played in high school, very badly, for a season-and-a-half. But I mean I'm a player now. At age 47. Living in a country where people don't even know the sport's basic terminology, generally speaking.
What happened was, seven years ago I met a guy I worked with who has now become one of my closest friends in Australia. He'd had baseball love in his family, something uncommon in this country, but had not totally taken to it himself. I got him involved in fantasy baseball, and from there, his baseball love took off. Having played cricket growing up, he already had some of the skills necessary for baseball, and began playing it on a club team that has both a summer and a winter season. Playing, and eventually even managing.
After a season or two of being tempted to join him, I took the plunge in 2019. I figured, if not now, when? And because I had not been a success when I played in high school, I decided to go for a position switch. Instead of outfield, I would now play third base, and then I wouldn't have the opportunity of misjudging fly balls and having too much time to think about my defense. It turns out I could make the throw accurately, and I was an asset on defense, even if my offense left something to be desired.
In the third or fourth game, my offense caught up. I had a couple of hits and a couple of runs knocked in in that game, with my son watching from the sideline. The future looked bright.
In the very next game, the third Saturday of May, I injured my left shoulder. I was making a dive for a ball through the hole between third and short, and I heard something snap. It turns out there was a small break -- my life's first ever broken bone -- and also a dislocation of the shoulder. Those might not have taken a long time to heal themselves, but I got a frozen shoulder, which plagued me for the rest of the calendar year. Needless to say, I was done for the season.
I was fully healed last year and was all set to play, but you probably know what happened there. Season cancelled by COVID.
So now we are preparing for the 2021 winter season -- it's autumn here, remember -- and I'm trying to prove to everyone else, but mostly to myself, that a 47-year-old really can play baseball.
My situation and the one in which Hobbs finds himself are pretty similar, if you remove the huge gulf in our talents and skill sets. Hobbs misses out on a surefire big league career after he's nearly killed by a crazy woman who shoots him, and tries to give his major league career a go in his late 30s. I never had a baseball future, but I did have a long layoff, just returning to action after nearly 30 years on the sidelines. Like Hobbs, I'm significantly older than most of the other players on my team, the majority of whom are in their late 20s or early 30s, like real baseball players. And my own "comeback" was short-circuited by an injury, just as Hobbs' old shooting injury endangers his comeback due to unspecified medical threats to his life of the bullet having been lodged his stomach for 16 years. (There's a lot of very vague statements you just have to take for granted in this movie.)
But if Hobbs can come back and hit bombs and make catches in the twilight of his playing days, maybe I can make a few throws over to first and knock the occasional single through the infield.
So yeah, I didn't like The Natural all that much. It's totally cornball and has a huge number of ridiculous occurrences, such as:
- The woman (Barbara Hershey) shooting Hobbs. There is no explanation for this. I guess she's just crazy, but she shoots Hobbs upon confirming he thinks he will become one of the best players of all time. I thought there was some kind of conspiracy going on, and maybe this woman was hired by a prospective rival of Hobbs, but no. Nothing of the sort, apparently.
- The fact that he was shot is so "embarrassing" to Hobbs that he refuses to tell anyone his own back story. In fact, he's so reluctant to go into any details that when people ask him where he's from, he says things like "Does it matter?" and "All over the place." It's a decidedly artificial level of disconnection. I almost considered him the baseball movie equivalent of The Man With No Name.
- A player dies by running through an outfield wall. This may be the only scene I had seen of The Natural, other than the climax, as I remembered it from when it was on cable when I was a kid. Even though I'd forgotten I'd seen this scene when I first started watching the movie, when it arrives in the narrative, I remembered that it had had something of an impact on me as a kid. It felt very ominous that a baseball player could die in the outfield. Today, it just feels ridiculous. No, the safety levels were not there back in the 1920s/1930s -- they didn't even wear helmets when they batted -- but I still don't believe a player would a) be able to crash through an outfield wall, or if he did, b) die from his injuries.
- A gun makes an appearace in the movie a second time. How many baseball movies have a single scene with a gun, let alone two? Kim Basinger fires a gun at the floor in a climactic scene. Again, another ridiculous moment.
- The movie doesn't care to explain why Hobbs never tried to play baseball seriously again after his shooting injury. It's one of many background details it feels like we should be filled in on, especially when Hobbs seems like he can hit a home run at will. How could you leave that kind of talent dormant?
- You'd think that Hobbs' home run exploding the light tower at the end would be enough of that kind of moment for one movie. But no, earlier in the movie, one of his home runs also explodes a clock.
- Hobbs' bat is called "Wonder Boy." He made it himself from the wood of a tree split by lighting. It has existed unscathed, not even a nick, for 20 years, then it breaks in his last at-bat of his career. This is the type of movie this is.
It occurred to me that this also has a lot of parallels with another baseball movie -- actually two baseball movies, if you count the sequel -- that I've watched in the past week. Major League would seem to have based some of its core plot structure on The Natural, as both films feature the vicissitudes in a season of a loser team that becomes a contender, and both have a high-stakes climax involving the owner betting against his/her own team. Maybe if I'd seen The Natural first, I would have considered Major League to be a ripoff of it, but since it was the other way around, I cherish Major League while finding The Natural highly square.
But at least now I know that a 47-year-old baseball player is not such a crazy idea. Until Bartolo Colon finally officially retires, there's still one active baseball player in pro ball who is older than I am. And there's still one active 47-year-old playing third base for the University of Melbourne E team, just hoping to get through this season without injury or plague, and maybe have my own little equivalent of a Roy Hobbs light tower moment, even if it's just hitting a ground ball single between third and short.
No comments:
Post a Comment