The Natural (director's cut)

http://www.renaud-bray.com

http://www.renaud-bray.com

Few films about baseball have passed the most important sports-film test. That is, to be as illuminating or enjoyable as watching the sport itself. Barry Levinson's The Natural, a very loose adaptation of Bernard Malamud's novel, passes this test. In fact, The Natural, despite a few nagging flaws, is quite possibly the best film ever made about baseball. Baseball has its own narrative, comprising dramas, tragedies, comedies, and morality plays. Like baseball, The Naturalis an odyssey, beginning when farmboy Roy Hobbs (Robert Redford) fashions himself a homemade bat -- called Wonderbat -- that takes him all the way to the big leagues before a scheming Siren (Barbara Hershey) sends him plummeting back to mortal territory. But Hobbs, like any good baseball player, has a chance for redemption late in the game -- and whether or not he makes good on that depends on how you see his story: through Malamud's book or Levinson's film. Cinematographer Caleb Deschanel does beautiful, sun-drenched, slow-motion work here, and even if he and Levinson come closer to elevating baseball to mythic levels than Malamud might have liked, it's hard to argue with the way it works. Ditto for golden-boy slugger Redford: if not quite as complicated as he was in the novel, he still makes an appealing hero. Baseball fans may still be waiting for the perfect baseball film, but The Natural, with several all-star caliber moments, compares favorably with a day in the park. [Dave Roth, Barnes & Noble]