The Natural (1984)
Directed by Barry Levinson
An unknown middle-aged batter named Roy Hobbs with a mysterious past appears out of nowhere to take a losing 1930s baseball team to the top of the league.
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What critics compared The Natural to
As he gets older, Brad Pitt looks more and more like Robert Redford, and seeing the two-time People Magazine Sexiest Man Alive in a baseball movie can’t help but bring to mind memories of The Natural.
When Redford was the same age as Pitt is now, he played Roy Hobbs in The Natural (1984).
The unlikely tandem of Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill helps drive what is arguably the most compelling and insightful baseball-themed film since Robert Redford launched a homerun into the stadium lights in "The Natural" (1984).
Unlike other inspirational sports stories (Hoosiers, The Blind Side, Miracle, The Natural), Moneyball is totally dependent on its audience's love for America's national pastime.
It starts with Pitt, currently the same age as Robert Redford was when he made The Natural, and filmed with some kind of Redfordian camera lens that, from certain angles, makes him look just like the guy.
It’s therefore disappointing but unsurprising to find Moneyball being analogised to baseball staples like Bang The Drum Slowly and The Natural rather than critics simply asking: is it a good movie?
"He moves them, inspires them - like Robert Redford in The Natural but in a muscle car equipped with machine guns and napalm."
This is more Field of Dreams than Bull Durham: baseball here is seen as something magical - Redford has a mystical bat named "Wonderboy", which he fashioned from a tree struck by lightning - rather than merely a sport.
The 1984 film The Natural was a mythic and mesmerizing movie about America's favorite pastime that also saluted the heroism of the lonely individualist.
We've seen the pursuit of perfection personified in films like Searching for Bobby Fischer and The Natural, but in those films the excellence of seeker was placed right up front.
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Virginia Madsen has to embody the possibility of unblocked connection, for Miles and for the movie, and she does it without going symbolic or hinting at self-congratulation. (For contrast, think of Glenn Close in The Natural.)
Malek’s is a three-base hit, but Viggo’s is the home run that takes out the stadium lights, like Robert Redford’s character in “The Natural.”
At times Stone hurts his own cause, whether it’s a scene where Snowden’s beloved mentor O’Brian appears on a giant screen during a Facetime call, a la Big Brother, or the irritating score that swells up as if Snowden is Roy Hobbs in “The Natural,” swinging for the fences because he loves his country, gosh dang it.
If "Episode III" were a person, it would be like Roy Hobbs in "The Natural," not as perfect as it had the potential to be, but exceeding low expectations for a hell of a whack out of the park.
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The film is heavily salted with a distinctive Texas flavor and deep-fried in noir by the exceptional cinematographer Caleb Deschanel (five Oscar nominations, including "The Natural").
Friedkin, Letts and their cast and crew -- the cinematographer is five-time Oscar nominee Caleb Deschanel, whose credits include "The Right Stuff," "The Natural" and "The Passion of the Christ" (a film that is closer to "Killer Joe" than Mel Gibson might want to admit) -- bring a lot of prestige and industry validation to this visually vibrant, thematically dark film, which in an earlier decade might have opened at a decaying inner-city movie palace or rural drive-in rather than in an "art" house.
…most sports stories (RAGING BULL, THE NATURAL)…