Barry Levinson (1984)
Midwestern country boy Roy Hobbs dreams of becoming the greatest baseball player of all time. In 1923 his progress towards a Major League Baseball career is stopped in its tracks: precocious talent Roy, just nineteen, suffers a serious gunshot wound and consequent persisting health problems. In 1939, aged thirty-five and after showing his abilities at semi-pro level, Roy gets signed to the New York Knights, who are currently propping up the Major League. Their coach is furious to be saddled with a middle-aged rookie and won’t give him a place on the team – until Roy seizes an opportunity in a Knights batting practice to show what he can do. It’s the start of a chance to transform the team’s fortunes and a second chance for Roy to realise that boyhood dream.
Although it’s based on an esteemed (1952) novel by an esteemed writer, Bernard Malamud, the screen version of The Natural is all about Hollywood mythology and iconography. This is plain to see even in the film’s early sequences – pre-adolescent Roy (Paul Sullivan Jr) and his father Ed (Alan Fudge), a Nebraska farmer, out in the fields with bat and ball. DP Caleb Deschanel gives the images a gilded nostalgic glow; on the soundtrack a sub-Aaron Copland anthem plays, courtesy of Randy Newman. In the next sequence, Roy’s father keels over with a fatal heart attack and Newman’s music promptly turns to sticky elegy (you almost hear syrup dripping from the violin strings). Hobbs Jr carries on honing his ball skills, now single-handedly. When a nearby tree is struck by lightning, Roy fashions himself a new bat from the tree, carving ‘Wonderboy’ plus lightning-bolt logo into the wood. The bat will be his Excalibur.
Things aren’t so plain to see in much of what follows in The Natural, for two reasons. In that opening section, young Iris Gaines (Rachel Hall), blonde-haired like Roy, watches him adoringly from the next-door farm. When the action moves forward a few years and the childhood sweethearts are in their late teens, Iris is played by thirty-six-year-old Glenn Close and Roy has turned into forty-seven-year-old Robert Redford. Their poignant farewell on the eve of Roy’s departure from Nebraska, for a try-out with the Chicago Cubs, takes place in discreet twilight. Once Roy is on the train for Chicago, with talent scout Sam Simpson (John Finnegan), the dark-toned visuals start their shift into what will be a more persistent obscurity: to signal the presence of sinister or malign characters who threaten to obstruct Roy’s path to greatness.
There’ll be worse to come than two of Roy and Sam’s fellow train passengers – ‘The Whammer’ (Joe Don Baker), a swaggering, boorish batting legend of the game, and Max Mercy (Robert Duvall), a shady, venal sportswriter – but they foreshadow the evil to come. During a train stop at a carnival, Sam wagers Mercy that Roy can strike out the Whammer in three pitches; to the astonishment of both nasty pieces of work, Roy does just that. The feat attracts the attention of another train passenger, Harriet Bird (Barbara Hershey), who looks every inch, and soon proves to be, a femme fatale. On arrival in Chicago, she invites greenhorn Roy to her tenebrous hotel room, though not to seduce him. Pathologically, morbidly obsessed with athletes, Harriet shoots Roy in the stomach before committing suicide.
The Manichaean lighting might seem problematic throughout these 1923 scenes – tricky for a cinematographer even as gifted as Caleb Deschanel to keep Robert Redford’s not-teenage face in shadow at the same time as stressing Roy Hobbs’ decency in contrast to the dark forces opposing him. This hardly matters, though, because it’s already clear that The Natural’s cynosure is the film’s star, much more than the character he’s playing. And it doesn’t matter at all once the narrative leaps ahead to sixteen years later, when Roy’s in his mid-thirties and Redford’s stellar good looks further reduce the age gap between them. That is, it doesn’t matter to Barry Levinson or his leading man: it matters a lot to the film’s dramatic quality.
Levinson reduces the other, younger New York Knights to Roy’s satellites – so much so that, with one exception, none of them registers even visually in the story. That exception is Bump Bailey (Michael Madsen), but not for long. Once Roy ousts him as the Knights’ star player, Bump loses his confidence: running desperately to make a catch, he crashes through a wall in the outfield and is killed! Besides, Redford’s exasperating reluctance to delve into the moral weaknesses of whoever he’s playing, in combination with his natural authority on screen, dilutes what the plot and the dialogue keep suggesting is an important theme in The Natural – that Roy Hobbs, although essentially honourable, might fall prey to temptation. Not with incorruptible Robert Redford in charge, he won’t.
Redford was disappointed not to get the role of Benjamin Braddock in Mike Nichols’ The Graduate (1967). How he didn’t get it is recounted by Mark Harris in his book Scenes from a Revolution: The Birth of the New Hollywood:
‘Nichols, who had championed the idea, surprised himself by turning [Redford] down. “We were friends, we had done [Barefoot in the Park on stage], I was playing pool with him, and I said, ‘I’m really sad, but you can’t do it. You can’t play a loser,’ “ says Nichols. “He said, ‘Of course I can play a loser!’ I said, ‘You can’t! Look at you! How many times have you ever struck out with a woman?’ And he said, I swear to you, ‘What do you mean?’ He didn’t even understand the concept. To him, it was like saying, ‘How many times have you been to a restaurant and not had a meal?’ “ ’
This story rather chimes with Robert Redford’s miscasting in The Natural, not just because Mike Nichols uses a baseball term and never mind that Roy Hobbs never ‘strikes out’ with a woman either. By this stage of his eminent career, Redford, if he wanted a role, was unlikely to be turned down by anyone. (The Natural was his first screen appearance in four years; in the meantime, he’d directed his first feature, Ordinary People, and won an Oscar for it.) Being too old for Roy Hobbs throughout, although it may sum up Redford’s stubbornness in being set on the role, is only part of the problem.
As written (in Roger Towne and Phil Dusenberry’s screenplay), Roy has a degree of native wit and is willing to say what he thinks, but he’s not a conventionally brainy type. Redford was unusual among American actors of his generation in being easily able to project intelligence; in fact, he looks naturally cerebral on screen. (Just as he didn’t like expressing a character’s weakness – as though nervous that fans might think it was his weakness – so Redford seemed comfortable reminding the audience of his own, very considerable intelligence.) Early in The Natural, Roy’s hesitancy in conversation is probably meant to signal his youthful lack of sophistication but Redford delivers the relevant lines so uneasily that Roy sounds simple-minded, while his face tells a different story.
Redford’s Roy hardly interacts with anyone – neither his teammates nor the women in his life, who include, as well as Iris and Harriet, Memo Paris (Kim Basinger). Memo, niece of the New York Knights’ coach, Pop Fisher (Wilford Brimley), is one of the few ambiguous elements of the story. After her couple of scenes as Bump Bailey’s girl, Memo emerges as a cross between gold-digging vamp and ill-used woman. She’s mixed up with villains determined to sink the Knights and force Pop to relinquish his part-ownership of the team – chiefly, a Mr Big known as ‘the Judge’ (Robert Prosky) and gambler-bookie Gus Sands (Darren McGavin) – but, once Memo seduces Roy, she shows some genuine feelings for him. Whereas Bump is revealed to have been bribed by the bad guys to throw games, Roy can’t be bought: his rectitude – or Robert Redford’s, at any rate – seems also to explain Roy’s distance from Memo, even when they’re sharing a bed. Memo really gets through to Roy only when, on the eve of a crucial big game, she poisons his food at a party, and he ends up in hospital.
Surgery reveals a silver bullet, lodged in Roy’s stomach since Harriet’s gun put it there sixteen-plus years ago. You could say that two femmes fatales have conspired to destroy him but Memo’s appearance, as well as her character, shows that, unlike Harriet, she’s slightly on the side of the angels. Even though she’s platinum blonde, Memo’s hair colour is a hint of kinship with Roy and Iris: in the visual scheme of The Natural, fair hair signifies virtue. On the point of leaving the Midwest homestead, Roy tells Iris he wants to marry her. It’s not clear why he breaks off contact thereafter – except that, of course, it must be so. Once Roy’s sporting exploits start getting media attention, Iris, now a single mother working in New York City (although she still also has the farm in Nebraska), hears about the newcomer to Major League and his trusty Wonderboy bat, and turns up at a Knights game. She certainly stands out in the crowd: backlit by Caleb Deschanel, Glenn Close’s blonde hair is an aureole. Redford is haloed repeatedly over the course of the film. Yet no sparks fly between him and Close, once Roy and Iris see each other again.
Redford’s self-absorption makes it hard to believe Roy when he tells Iris he’d have loved to be pointed out on the street as baseball’s GOAT. There’s a bit of mock black-and-white newsreel that shows him talking with a group of awestruck kids; his manner towards them is pleasantly encouraging yet detached. The only youngster that Roy shows any kind of feeling for is chubby batboy Billy Savoy (George Wilkosz), who, under Roy’s guidance, makes a bat that will come in handy in the film’s climactic game. Why did Robert Redford want to play Roy Hobbs? Because, on screen at least, Roy is a true hero, repeatedly overcoming adversity and resisting corruption – though Redford’s presence and performance drain Roy’s sporting and moral victories of suspense. Perhaps also to show that he really could handle a baseball bat and pitch a ball. He seems to do both very convincingly, but this gets tedious: whenever a game has reached a vital stage and Roy’s in the batter’s box, Levinson insists on showing Redford’s shot in admiring slow motion.
Redford so dominates proceedings that he’s inevitably the most evident problem. But The Natural is in other ways bewildering (far beyond a British viewer’s vain struggle to grasp baseball’s scoring system). This is a film in which lightning strikes more than twice – add to that, the mostly transparent good or evil characters, the highly predictable plotting, the even more predictable course taken by every one of the baseball games (you see what’s coming almost shot by shot). All these suggest broadly enjoyable, melodramatic storytelling of the kind coming out of Hollywood during the period when most of The Natural’s story is happening. There are what feel like dozens of newspaper-headline montages as narrative bridges, as though Barry Levinson is acknowledging and embracing the movie tradition in which he’s working. Yet the film has none of the energy or pace of those 1930s pictures. It drags solemnly along, as if to assert depth.
By focusing (literally) on Redford alone, Levinson deprives the audience of a sense of what it means to Roy to be in a team with, and outshining, players of a younger generation. (The idea that, without Roy, the Knights aren’t much of a team anyway, is hardly a sufficient pretext for this.) When Iris turns up at the ball game, there’s no payoff of Roy catching sight of her – even though she’s glowingly conspicuous in the stand. Encountering Roy in 1939, Max Mercy, who prides himself on his memory, gets the feeling that they’ve met before, but it takes ages for Mercy to remember the carnival and what then happened in Chicago – when he does remember, we don’t see the lightbulb moment. After their reunion, Roy starts to tell Iris what happened during the sixteen years he was incommunicado; the sequence then fades out; we’re given no idea of how Iris reacted or what she felt. Levinson appears to think these omissions are proof that his film is more sophisticated than its antecedents, which spelt everything out. But omissions are all they are.
The high-powered supporting cast is thwarted throughout; at least Richard Farnsworth, in a skinny role as the Knights’ sympathetic assistant coach, manages to suggest a man who had a life before the call of ‘Action!’ so holds your attention whenever he’s on screen. In the home straight, to mix sporting metaphors, The Natural is increasingly ridiculous. The hospital that admits poisoned Roy is so busy that he can only get a bed on a maternity ward; the ward doctor, presumably an obstetrician, informs Roy that his stomach lining has been so progressively damaged by Harriet’s bullet that if he tries playing baseball again, he may die. Roy gets up from his sick bed for the game that could save the Knights and win them the championship pennant. Iris is once more in the crowd, this time with her adolescent son, blonde-haired Ted (Robert Rich III). With Roy struggling at bat and sitting disconsolately in the dugout, Iris gets a note passed to him there. This informs Roy of Ted’s presence and of Ted’s father’s identity – which anyone watching The Natural will already have worked out, but Roy hadn’t. This is the inspiration he needs, although he first hits a foul shot that splits Wonderboy in half. He tells Bobby to choose a replacement bat: no prizes for guessing which one.
A few tastefully modest bloodstains from his damaged gut form on Roy’s shirt but there’s no stopping him now. He whacks a home run into the stadium lights, destroying them in a power surge that sends up a shower of sparks that morph into a celebratory fireworks display, as Roy wins the game and the pennant for the New York Knights. The film ends where it began, in the field where Roy and his father used to play. Now it’s Roy and Ted; Iris watches; dazzling smiles all round. I haven’t read Bernard Malamud’s novel so haven’t much idea of how much the film changes its source material – but it’s clear from Wikipedia that the finale is very different. In the novel, at the end of which Roy’s team loses the final game: ‘Hobbs sits bemoaning the end of the season and possibly his career, [Max] Mercy finds out that he was paid to throw the game. If this report is true, Roy will be expelled from the game and all of his records removed’. The moviemakers’ flagrant departure from Malamud’s story, which no doubt helped The Natural turn a box-office profit, puts a capper on an abominable film.
17 July 2026
