Amid all the whacky fanfare that last months’ Republican National
Convention created for Clint Eastwood and his chair full of Invisible Obama,
it’s nice to see Eastwood in the medium that made him famous — movies.
Several writers, including myself, questioned his health after he
stumbled through that painful 12-minute speech that featured the screen
legend’s worst acting run since Paint
Your Wagon. After the RNC, he went on vacation and has since re-emerged to reassure
everyone he is fine and to “get off my lawn.”
Trouble With the Curve
is not his greatest role, but it’s a solid one. It features Eastwood doing his
cranky old man impersonation, which he exploits more frequently now that he is
82 years old and more likely to be packing a bottle of multivitamins and
trifocals than a .44 Magnum.
I was skeptical of the movie at first because it begins painfully
slow and then delays, delays, delays what the audience surely sees coming — the
switch from a geriatric drama to road movie. When it finally does make the
switch, Curve finds its motivation
and becomes a touching story of a father reuniting with his daughter.
Eastwood plays Gus, a baseball scout for the Atlanta Braves. Gus
is old-school: he listens to the sound of the smack of ball on glove, he
watches tiny movements in batters’ hands and he encourages his players with
gentle motivation. A younger guy on the scouting staff uses computers and
algorithms, and he wouldn’t recognize the soul of baseball if it stole home in
front of him. “When was the last time you even watched a game?” Gus asks him.
This is Curve’s little jab at Moneyball and Billy Beane, who used math
to pick his players. Moneyball is the
better movie (if only slightly), but I must side with Gus here: baseball is an
art, not an algebra equation.
Gus is getting old and his eyes are giving out on him. He refuses
to see an eye specialist because he’s … well, old and set in his ways. I didn’t
like this lengthy first act, which features Eastwood acting comically inept as
he rams his convertible out of the garage, burns a hamburger to an ashy cinder
and says things such as “the interweb” or “yoga, that voodoo.” Curve makes much ado about showing Gus
as an old uninformed miser, and provides too much evidence to support it. I wanted
the plot to start earlier.
When it did, the movie grew on me fast. It begins when Gus hits
the road to track an up-and-coming slugger the Braves want to take as their
first pick in the upcoming draft. Gus needs to find out if the athlete is a genuine
star or just another flash in the pan. The kid is Bo Gentry and he’s as close
as the film gets to a villain. All he can talk about is making the majors so he
can bed every female on the East Coast. His appetite for baseball seems secondary
to his desire for money, women and fame. Baseball needs fewer Bo Gentrys, but
he missed that memo.
Gus can barely drive without smashing something, so his attorney
daughter Mickey (Amy Adams), named after Mickey Mantle, is guilted into coming
along to watch out for the old man. Growing up in a baseball house, she’s
naturally gifted at recognizing talent and spouting off random World Series
trivia. This comes in handy when she meets an ex-pro played by Justin
Timberlake, who has chemistry with Adams but delivers
his baseball lines like he’s reading a parts catalog for a 1985 Buick Skylark.
Baseball is wrapped around Trouble
With the Curve, but it’s core is the idea that we are all replaceable. Gus
can be replaced by a computer or a younger scout, Mickey can be replaced by
another attorney at her firm, and if baseball players can’t cut it they’ll be
replaced by those who can. This is an interesting theme, one that Curve uses at every step of its plot,
right up to the point where Gus learns baseball scouts are replaceable, but
fathers and daughters aren’t. It’s a bit sappy, and has a rather sudden
unexpected and dark twist that rattled me, but I liked Curve’s delivery.
I especially liked the last 20 minutes that literally throws a
curve at your expectations. I did not see it coming, and neither will you.
The movie is directed by Robert Lorenz, who has been an assistant
director on Eastwood’s own films for many years. I would have preferred a
faster pacing at the beginning, but I think this is a promising start for a new
director. Eastwood himself does a decent job. He panders for jokes
occasionally, but there are moments of genius in his delivery. I especially
liked one of his lines during a bar fight: “Get out of here before I have a
heart attack trying to kill you.” In another scene, this one heartbreaking and
raw, he sings “You Are My Sunshine” to a grave. His scenes with Adams, a truly
delightful and talented actress, are fun because they play off each other,
sometimes with frustrating results.
One technical issue: the film must have been shot digitally,
because all of the nighttime or low-light shots have digital noise, or grain,
and none of the blacks are very rich. The old film technology didn’t do this so
noticeably, but it was replaced.
Much has been written about Clint Eastwood lately. Forget all of
it and go see him in Trouble With the
Curve, a movie that rewards Eastwood by casting him with equally talented
human beings, and not chairs.
