Filmbook: "The Natural" (1984)

Yesterday I wrote about how I felt underwhelmed by the protagonist of Bernard Malamud's THE NATURAL, who alienated me and didn't really prove his so-called abilities. The Roy Hobbs of the movie "The Natural" has the opposite problem: The film pushes so hard to make Roy a hero that I found myself pushing back, probably because I had just read the book which makes clear that he wasn't a hero.

The plot is virtually identical to the book's: Talented older player with murky past finally gets to the majors, performs great feats. The crowd scenes in this book are very cool, as are the old-timey uniforms and the feeling that this team is really uniting behind Hobbs. Major assistance in this department has to go to the score in creating moments like this (not really a spoiler unless you read the YouTube info):

But as the movie goes on that old alienation came back, only I felt disconnected from the character because he was too good instead of being too bad. And the ending, which is the biggest change from the book, just took the hero worship way over the top for me. It's as if adapters Roger Towne and Phil Dusenberry read the book and thought, "Man, this guy's kind of a jerk. Let's make him totally saintly! Much better."

And in that capacity, having Robert Redford playing Roy didn't help matters. I like Robert Redford a lot, but he was 48 when this movie came out, and no amount of soft-focus lighting could disguise that he had a good decade on Malamud's Hobbs. So he goes around with this halo of light on him, which I'm sure was deliberate, but it made me even less inclined to see the movie's take on the player.

Filmbook verdict: Boy. I don't want to recommend the book or the movie. Watch "Field of Dreams" and read THE BOYS OF SUMMER instead.

Previously
Is This The Great American Baseball Novel?
Roger Kahn, A Boy Among Boys