The Natural (1984) Review

Roy Hobbs arrives in a major league dugout at thirty-five with a bat he made from a tree struck by lightning and no explanation for where he has been. The manager assumes he is a joke. Sixteen years earlier he was shot in a hotel room by a woman he had just met.

The 8 is for a film that commits absolutely to mythology and executes it at a level almost nothing in the sports genre approaches. This is not a film about baseball. It is a film about a man with a gift, a wound he cannot discuss, and one more chance arriving far too late.

The two points come off for the ending, which is glorious and false. Malamud wrote a man who fails, and the film gives him a home run into the stadium lights, and I understand the choice and think the novel was right.

It Is Shot as a Legend

Caleb Deschanel’s photography is the reason this film has outlived every other baseball picture. Everything is backlit. Sunlight comes through dust in the outfield, through barn slats, through a train window, and human figures are frequently silhouettes moving through gold.

That is not realism and it is not trying to be. A real baseball game is flat and green under stadium light, and this film photographs the sport the way somebody remembers it from childhood, which is to say inaccurately and better.

The lightning sequence establishes the register in the first ten minutes. A tree is struck, a boy carves a bat from it, and the film treats this as a plain fact instead of a fantasy element. Nobody comments. The bat has a name and it works.

Randy Newman’s score does the other half. It is brass and strings at full extension, unashamedly heroic, and it has been borrowed by sports broadcasts for forty years, which tells you it does its job perhaps too well.

The baseball itself was shot in Buffalo, largely at War Memorial Stadium, a 1937 park that was demolished a few years after production. That is the last piece of the illusion: a real period ballpark with real dimensions, photographed before it disappeared, doing work no set could have done.

The Wound Nobody Names

Hobbs is shot by Harriet Bird in a hotel room in 1923 and the film never explains her. She asks him whether he will be the best there ever was, he says yes, and she shoots him with a silver bullet and jumps out of a window.

That sequence is drawn from something real. In 1949 a woman lured the Philadelphia first baseman Eddie Waitkus to a hotel room and shot him in the chest. He survived and returned to the sport, and Malamud built his novel on it.

The film’s choice to leave her unexplained is correct. She is a condition instead of a character, and Barbara Hershey plays her as somebody in the grip of an idea that has nothing to do with Roy personally.

What follows is sixteen missing years the film also declines to fill. Hobbs will not discuss where he has been, and Redford plays the refusal and never the history. Every scene where somebody asks and he changes the subject builds the character more than a flashback would.

Redford Was Forty-Seven

He is playing a man of thirty-five and he was closer to fifty, and the film uses the discrepancy instead of hiding it. Hobbs is visibly older than everybody around him and the whole plot is about time already spent.

Redford could also play baseball, which matters more than it should. He had been a competent ballplayer, he does his own swings, and the mechanics look right to anybody who knows the sport.

The performance is built on withholding, which is his best mode. Hobbs is polite, quiet and unreadable, and the emotion arrives in two or three moments across two hours, each of them enormous because of the drought around them.

Glenn Close is the film’s other pillar and was nominated for it. Iris appears in the stands in a white hat with light behind her, which is the most literal image in the picture, and Close plays it entirely straight so the sentiment survives contact with the staging.

Kim Basinger has the harder and less rewarded part. Memo is the woman working for the man trying to fix the pennant, and she is given the thankless job of being the wrong choice, but Basinger plays her as somebody who is also trapped, who knows exactly what she is being used for, and who cannot see a way out of it either.

The Ending Is the Argument

Malamud’s novel ends with Hobbs taking the bribe, striking out, and a boy asking him to say it is not true. It is a deliberate inversion of the Black Sox scandal and the whole point of the book.

The film has him refuse the money, bleed through his uniform from the old wound, and hit the ball into the stadium lights, which explode in a shower of sparks while he rounds the bases in slow motion under falling glass.

As a sequence it is one of the great pieces of American film sentiment. As an adaptation it removes the book’s argument and replaces it with the thing the book was written against.

The production history explains the decision. Both credited screenwriters wrote a more positive ending than Malamud’s, on the reasoning that his post-war bleakness would not sell, and Malamud was not consulted during production. TriStar also insisted on a May 1984 release and rushed post-production to make it.

What It Bought and What It Lost

Twenty-eight million dollars against about forty-eight, four Academy Award nominations including Glenn Close for supporting actress, mixed reviews, and a great many complaints about exactly the ending discussed above.

Time has been kind to it in the way it usually is to sincerity. The images have entered the culture completely, the score is used at sporting events by people who have never seen the film, and the lights-exploding shot is quoted constantly.

So the commercial and cultural verdict is clear and the artistic one is not. A film that softened its source into a crowd-pleaser is the version everybody knows, and Malamud’s ending is read by a fraction of the people who have seen the home run.

My own position is that both can stand. The film is excellent at what it chose to be, and what it chose was smaller and safer than the novel. The 8 is for the execution and the two missing points are the argument it declined to make.

There is one detail that suggests the film knew. Hobbs bleeds through his uniform while he bats, from a wound he received sixteen years earlier, and the film cuts to it repeatedly during the triumph. Somebody wanted the cost visible even in the middle of granting the wish, and that instinct is the most Malamud thing in the picture.

Should you watch The Natural?

Yes, and read the novel afterward. This is one of the most beautiful American films of the eighties, photographed as memory and scored as legend, and it is also a story about failure that decided at the last minute to be a story about triumph.

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