Considering The Natural

Barry Levinson’s The Natural works as a sort of Reagan Era populist cliché generator. It’s not so much a movie as it is an algorithm for producing tropes to comfort Baby Boomers. It takes place in a golden hued past where baseball is the glue of society, farm boys grow up to be taciturn heroes, and everyone lives in a world where not even on trains or the streets of Chicago will you walk past a black person.

The Natural is sappy and unselfconsciously sentimental. It is tied so closely to the fantasy of a safe and idealized past that it has no fewer than four reassuring father figures provided for the protagonist. Robert Redford’s gifted but aging baseball player Roy Hobbs has his father in the first section, little seen but present, his manager in the second section when he’s a young up and comer and then finally, as though both Richard Farnsworth and Wilfred Brimley showed up for Casting and Levinson couldn’t bear to be without either, Hobbs gets them both as coaches on his major league team. Their scenes together veritably ooze with avuncular crustiness. It’s as though Al Pacino as Tony Montana and Robert Deniro as Travis Bickle were put in a movie together and told to out-menace each other.

This redundancy gets at the heart of what makes The Natural hard to enjoy even on its own terms. It’s not just that it is sentimental and not just that it is simple minded and reactionary. Entertainment should not be kept from expressing fantasies as commonly held and commonly comforting as conservative fever dreams of idyllic pasts that never existed.

What makes The Natural more embarrassing than entertaining is its strident redundancy. We don’t just get a mythical lightening strike origin story of a boy and his bat, we get it shot in slow motion with a blaring and feverish full orchestral score. We don’t just get one conniving vixen who uses her sexuality to try and destroy the hero, we get both Barbara Hershey and Kim Basinger, contrasted in their evil sexiness with the beatifically clean and wholesome Glenn Close. Close's character who is so above reproach you kind of imagine when she and young Roy Hobbs stole into the barn as youths it was to milk cows and maybe play a hand of Old Maid.

It’s not just that The Natural uses simple minded tropes and builds a bland white-washed vision of the past. It’s that it does so with ferocious tenacity and is not satisfied with being merely absurd.
 
Though I must interject that I greatly admire its cinematography.  Caleb Deschanel (father of Zooey and Emily) does visual schmaltz better than nearly anyone. His credits also include Message in a Bottle and The Passion of the Christ (in as much as ultra religious torture porn can be classified as schmaltz, though I think it applies in the case of Mel Gibson’s film). In The Natural Deschanel’s frame is so skillfully overloaded by golden hour significance and glowing reminiscence that the whole thing actually explodes by the end into a sparkling orgasm of White Anglo Saxon ecstasy over what else, a home run.