The Natural (1984) Review
8/10
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’s been. The manager assumes he’s a joke. Sixteen years earlier he was shot in a hotel room by a woman he’d 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 a film about a man with a gift, a wound he can’t discuss, and one more chance arriving far too late. The two points come off for the ending. That’s 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’s a long way from realism, and the film doesn’t care.
A real baseball game is flat and green under stadium light, and this film photographs the sport the way somebody remembers it from childhood, inaccurately and better. I could look at those backlit frames all day. I think Deschanel did more to make this film last than anybody in front of the camera.
The lightning sequence establishes the tone 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’s brass and strings at full extension, unashamedly heroic, and sports broadcasts have borrowed it for forty years. That 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’s the last piece of the illusion: a real period ballpark with real dimensions, photographed before it disappeared, doing work no set could have done.
Decide early whether you’re writing realism or myth, because the two make opposite demands. Myth requires that impossible things be reported without comment, and any character who expresses surprise breaks it.
Nobody in this film questions the bat. That single consistency is what allows an audience to accept everything else, including a man who hasn’t played professionally arriving in the majors at thirty-five.
The visual grammar has to agree. Backlight, silhouette and dust are the myth tone, and one flatly lit realistic scene would expose the whole apparatus.
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’ll 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’s a condition instead of a character, and Barbara Hershey plays her as somebody in the grip of an idea that’s nothing to do with Roy personally. What follows is sixteen missing years the film also declines to fill. Hobbs won’t discuss where he’s 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’s 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. That counts for 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, and that’s Redford at his best. 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.
I love watching him dodge a question. He gets more out of a changed subject than most actors get out of a monologue.
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. That’s 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’s given the thankless job of being the wrong choice, but Basinger plays her as somebody who’s also trapped, who knows exactly what she’s being used for, and who can’t see a way out of it either.
A protagonist who refuses to explain himself is a gift to a story, provided the audience can see there’s something to explain. The refusal has to cost him visibly. Withhold the backstory and dramatize the withholding. Somebody asks, he deflects, and the deflection is a scene. A flashback answering the question ends the tension permanently.
Casting an actor visibly older than the part can be a resource. Here the whole subject is lost time, and a forty-seven-year-old face showing it is worth more than accurate casting.
The Ending Is the Argument
Malamud’s novel ends with Hobbs taking the bribe, striking out, and a boy asking him to say it’s not true. It’s a deliberate inversion of the Black Sox scandal and the 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’s 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.
This ending pulls me two ways. The exploding lights are gorgeous and I’m grinning while the glass falls, and a minute later I’m annoyed with myself for being bought so easily. Malamud wrote a man who takes the money, and the film hands that same man a triumph the book never let him have. Those two missing points live right here.
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 wouldn’t sell, and Malamud wasn’t 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, people who have never seen the film use the score at sporting events, and the lights-exploding shot is quoted constantly.
So the commercial and cultural verdict is clear and the artistic one isn’t. 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’s 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.
Changing an ending changes the meaning of everything before it. Every scene in this film is identical to a version that ends in failure, and they mean something different because of the last four minutes.
Which is why the ending is the only part of a draft worth fighting hardest over. It’s the cheapest thing to change and the most expensive thing to get wrong.
When you soften a source, be honest with yourself about what you’re buying. Here it bought an audience and a permanent place in American sports iconography, and it cost the reason the book was written.
Should you watch The Natural?
Yes, and read the novel afterward. It’s as beautiful as any American film of the eighties, photographed as memory and scored as legend, and I’d rank it above every other baseball picture I can name. It’s also a story about failure that decided at the last minute to be a story about triumph, and that loss of nerve is exactly why it sits at 8 for me.
