The SmarK DVD Rant for The Natural (Blu Ray)

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The SmarK DVD Rant for The Natural (Blu-Ray)

It’s interesting that a period piece could feel so timeless, especially in an era where athletes have become rock stars, lured away from their natural talents by fame and money. Bernard Malamud foresaw the same thing back in the ’50s, when he wrote a novel called "The Natural", about a baseball player who squanders his god-given talents and pays the price for it. It’s basically the Arthurian legend crafted into a baseball story, and you knew that Hollywood would be all over that.

And yeah, I LOVED this movie.



The Film

Robert Redford plays Roy Hobbs, a country bumpkin who has a natural talent for the game even as a kid. The first 10 minutes are a breakneck pace of backstory, as Hobbs’ father dies while working the field, and a lightning storm that night shatters a tree in the yard. Hobbs fashions his own bat, Wonderboy, from the dead tree, and if you’ve seen as many episodes of The Simpsons as I have, you’ll probably recognize this and many other plot points. Hobbs gets called up to the majors, leaving his best girl behind, and has a not-so-friendly wager with Babe Ruth stand-in "The Whammer", striking him out on three pitches to begin his legendary rise. However, just as you think the movie is going to document the rise of a young star, he meets up with a femme fatale and gives the wrong answer to a question about why he wants to be a baseball player, and suddenly the movie takes a totally different turn than I was expecting. Basically the hero of the story, Hobbs, has failed his first major test (temptation) and been punished quite severely by the gods. In this case a bullet through the stomach that sidetracks his major league ambitions for 16 years. This incident was actually based on a real one, although the real woman was just a batshit crazy stalker instead of a messenger from the gods.

When Roy finally returns to baseball (as the story now borrows from The Odyssey), Roy is a middle-aged rookie getting a second chance with the last-place New York Knights. That the team is named The Knights is of course not a coincidence in the least. Hobbs is a hero with a quest and the baseball team is a blatant reference to the Knights of the Round Table. Hobbs has also changed his game, switching from a fireballing pitcher into a power-hitting right fielder (a reference to Babe Ruth’s similar transformation). The manager ("Pops" Fisher, the modern version of the Fisher King from the Arthur myth) refuses to play Hobbs, so the hand of the gods comes down and literally kills off arrogant right fielder Bump Bailey (played by a very young Michael Madsen) to give the job to Hobbs. The lesson is clear: Follow the right path, and the gods give you the tools you need. Stray from it, and bad things happen. To reinforce this message, Pops tells Roy to "hit the cover off the ball" in his first at-bat, and that’s exactly what happens. Roy and his magic bat (the modern Excalibur, of course) are staying on the good path, so good things happen. It’s a little heavy-handed and cartoonish in some ways, but that’s what you get with big mythological stories sometimes.

Hobbs of course becomes the big star he always wanted to be, although this time he makes sure to ply his trade for the rock bottom major league salary (which in 1939 wasn’t very much at all), spurning the financial advances of the shadowy owner known only as The Judge. He’s very literally shadowed, preferring to sit in the dark in his office. Unfortunately while Hobbs has learned his lesson about humility, he hasn’t learned anything about avoiding troublesome dames, in this case taking up with blonde bombshell Memo (Kim Basinger before she was any good), at which point his batting goes into the toilet and the team goes on a losing streak. The two are so clearly linked together that it’s a little maddening as a viewer that he continues to fall for her bullshit, but that’s why he’s a tragic flawed hero. Whereas the original novel held true to the character and went for the dark ending, the movie of course takes his moral plight (throw the playoff game and make millions or play his best and potentially die due to injuries) and crafts one of the most famous happy ending payoffs in movie history. Either one works, actually.

As sometimes cheesy and silly as the big symbolic moments in this movie are (time is catching up with him, so he hits a home run that literally shatters a clock at Wrigley Field, for example), they’re still pretty awesome. Plus I love baseball, so movies like this one which tie it into bigger things and have the gods represented by giant lightning bolts to boot make for great viewing experiences. If you’ve never seen The Natural, I highly recommend it for any fan of sports movies.

Audio & Video

The transfer to Blu-Ray looks nice, but as with most of this catalogue titles there’s little improvement seen over regular DVD. It looks about as good as a movie from 1984 is going to, but film grain is still evident and it doesn’t have the good deep contrasts that a modern release would have. The case lists the audio as DTS 5.1, but it only registered as 5.0 on my receiver (as in no subwoofer). But then this isn’t a movie that shows off the system anyway, aside from the crack of the bat and some good surround usage when the crowd makes noise.

Bonus Features

Amazon lists this as the Director’s Cut, but it’s actually the original theatrical version. Not sure why they didn’t offer both versions, actually.

Anyway, the main feature is an hour-long documentary detailing the making of the movie from novel to screen, plus you get deleted scenes, the story of Eddie Waitkus (whose shooting inspired the one in the movie) and a fascinating featurette on the movie’s mythology ties. All this stuff was imported directly from the last DVD release, and there’s still no commentary track. The Blu Ray also adds the new "movieIQ" trivia track that Sony has been using, but it seems like the PS3 is the only player that can actually use it, because my Samsung player isn’t compatible. Oh well.

The Pulse

I hadn’t seen this movie since I was a kid, and I’m really glad I went back and watched it again with years of baseball fandom and knowledge of the myths behind it, because it made for an even more entertaining experience. Highly recommended, but don’t necessarily bother with the Blu-Ray version.