The Natural

"My life didn't turn out the way I expected."

-Roy Hobbes

It's the stupid season in our household, when Peg's forced to deal with my spring baseball nostalgic fever. I have the Braves playing over my phone while I'm working outside. I bore my paralegal with stories of going to see the 1971 Braves, of watching Hank Aaron swing a bat, Ralph Garr steal second, and Phil Niekro throw his crazy knuckleball over the plate (sometimes) at maybe sixty miles an hour.

And along with all that, to Peg's chagrin, come the movies. Last week it was Major League, a lightweight offering about the misfit Cleveland Indians somehow winning their division. Last night was a more serious movie, The Natural, a beautiful two hour meditation on the nature of redemption and love, all set on a sepia toned stage of late 1930s baseball.

Robert Redford plays Roy Hobbs, a farmboy prodigy who, on his way to the big city for his shot at the majors, encounters a black widow of a baseball groupie who lures him into a hotel room where she shoots him and kills himself. The story then fast-forwards eighteen years, when he re-emerges as a rookie in his mid-thirties called up by the New York Knights. The Knights are in an ownership battle between the kindly manager/owner, played by Wilford Brimley, and "the Judge", a diabolical weasel of a man who takes the team outright if they don't win the pennant that year. The Judge controls the players through his bookie consigliore and their honey trap young vamp, played by Kim Basinger.

The team stinks until Hobbs shows up, and his prodigal skills begin to lift the entire team. Soon he finds himself in the bed of the honey trap, and being offered envelopes of money to lose. He starts to falter, becomes a laughing stock, until the girl he left behind at the farm stands in the seats one afternoon, haloed by the setting sun, and the sight of her leads Hobbs to hit a home run into the scoreboard clock. Her presence also leads him back to who he really is, even as the honey trap pursues him ever more desperately, and a reporter who's a little too chummy with the bookie digs up the scandal of Roy's past and tries to blackmail him with it.

And the actual gunshot wound begins to reopen, just like the Fisher King if you know your Arthurian myths. I won't spoil it for you if you've never seen the movie, but I can tell you it's redemptive and triumphant in the end, a much different finale than the one originally written by Bernard Malamud, in which the weight of the youthful failure destroys Hobbs and wounds everyone who cares about him. That's real life maybe, but it's not great cinema. The Natural certainly is.

I don't know why The Natural has always resonated with me. Maybe it's the beauty of the cinematography, which I now know includes farm scenes shot not far from Canandaigua Lake up in our neck of the woods, and baseball and city scenes shot in lovely Buffalo. The natural light of those places in the summertime just feels like goodness illuminating the space.

Even before I knew all that, or had ever seen western New York, there were the movie quotes that called me up short. Even the laconic Hobbs rolls out some great lines, like "My life didn't turn out the way I expected," when asked what became of the young man who was on his way to being "the greatest there ever was". Preach it, brother.

Or when Iris Gaines, the girl-now-woman who raised the son Roy didn't know he'd fathered before he left for the big leagues, reflects on what they've lived and who they've become:

Iris: You know, I believe we have two lives.

Roy: How? What do you mean?

Iris: The life we learn with and the life we live after that.

That movie came out when I was twenty. I didn't get that line back then. I sure do now.

Usually my Baseball Easter season reaches its climax with watching Field of Dreams, and bawling into my Jameson's when Ray plays catch with his late father. Not sure P's going to be able tolerate that, however; the movie loses her when Kevin Costner is out in the middle of several hundred acres of corn working with a hand hoe. It rubs her farm girl fur the wrong way. I may have to slip off by myself between now and Opening Day (fifteen days from now, but who's counting?) and watch it on my tablet.

Until then.