Trouble With the Curve| C
Old soldiers never die, they just soldier on,
and in the case of Clint Eastwood they keep cranking out films well into their
twilight years. The prodigious Eastwood has been making movies about washed-up
coots grappling with their diminished potency since he was still relatively
young and vital, and his last onscreen turn, in 2008’s Gran Torino, was
presumed to be his swan song to acting. Yet, here he is, back on screen,
directed by his longtime producing partner turned newbie director Robert
Lorenz, and playing yet another grizzled grump who must open his heart to
change, even as the performer has become calcified in his mannerisms. The only
snag is that if the former Dirty Harry keeps trying to prove his relevance, he
might need to dig deeper than crowd-pleasing trifles like this one.
This time Clint turns to the shopworn metaphors
of the baseball diamond, playing a crotchety major league scout determined to
show those number-crunching, computer-using Moneyball whippersnappers a
thing or two. He’s got an old man’s name (Gus), an old man’s shambling gait,
and the same Tupperware he’s had since the Nixon administration. Widower Gus is
fixed in his ways — but those ways have served him for decades as an expert
scout for the Atlanta Braves, and the only thing slowing him down now is the
slowly spreading glaucoma that’s making it harder and harder for him to see the
pitches anymore.
Ownership is looking for an excuse to put the grouchy cuss
out to pasture, but the sympathetic director of scouting (John Goodman) wants
to give Gus one more shot in the name of loyalty, and so he dispatches the
veteran to a North Carolina backwater to check out a heavily hyped slugger.
Gus’ estranged, adult daughter, Mickey (Amy Adams), is recruited to serve as
his eyes — and conscience — and she agrees to take a brief respite from
climbing the ladder as her high-stress law firm, presumably because her love
life is in the dumps and she has unresolved daddy issues, not the least of
which is that she was named after a Yankee legend. Mickey keeps pressing her
reluctant pops to revisit their tortured family history, but gets mostly grunts
in return. She’s making little headway on that front, but luckily she’s got an
obvious romantic foil in the form of Justin Timberlake’s Johnny, a burnt-out
former pitching stud now scouting for the Red Sox while dreaming of a job in
the announcer’s booth. If you’re surprised when the uptight lawyer and the
cocky hotshot start going clog dancing, skinny-dipping and making googly-eyes
at each other, then we can presume that you’ve never seen a movie before.
Just as the wizened Gus can tell if a prospect
has a flaw in his swing just by the crack of his bat, experienced moviegoers
will be able to spot the predictable plot points coming down the pipe. It’s
likely Eastwood prefers it that way; he choose Randy Brown’s clichéd script as
surely as a retiree orders the same comforting slab of meatloaf he’s had ten
thousand times before.
A
one-time politician, Clint knows how to work a crowd, and he surrounds himself
with an able cast, led by the sprightly and smart Adams, counterbalancing the
crusty strangeness of his own performance. Eastwood’s irascible, throaty growl,
which sounds like a thousand rusty screen door hinges opening at once, is so
intense it takes a few minutes to settle in to the idea that he’s not kidding
around with it. This is how Clint speaks, and always has, though he’s aware enough
of the absurdity to play his gruffness for laughs. After 50-odd years in
showbiz, and dozens of turns behind the camera, there isn’t much that Clint
Eastwood doesn’t know about his own skills or about filmmaking, and if he wants
to indulge in maudlin, cornball sentimentalism now and then, it’s his
prerogative — and it’s our prerogative as viewers to wait for a better pitch.
This article appears in Sep 19-25, 2012.