Homer is given double-meaning in The Natural: A home run and Homer of Greek Myths. Both thoughts are present. Robert Redford, as wunderkind and “Wonderboy” baseball prodigy turned old over-achiever, Roy Hobbs, dings balls of cushioned wound up cork outta the park again and again, and also, he is a God, endowed with the power of Thunder, which split the tree from which he fashioned his own bat as a young boy, the same bat he’s now brought to The Show. The Natural, as it was originally written by Bernard Malamud in 1952, is a Greek Tragedy. Story of a baseball player who gets gunned down by some Goddess at what woulda been the height of his ability as a player. Some sixteen years pass. And he’s miraculously given a ticket back into the big leagues. How it often goes. (Never happened and never would). What comes to pass is that this fella Hobbs still has it. Still has it but on a team designed to lose, by forces and systems of power much larger than himself — the Fates conspire against man, to draw him into battle, and here, the arena is the baseball park, the great American proving ground.
The difference with Barry Levinson’s 1984 adaptation of the novel, is that it’s all flattened out into a story of American Exceptionalism. As Redford rounds the bases of each act, the tragedies his character faces are overcome, not for any special reason that is tangible in the story, but because this is an American Story. That’s what makes The Natural questionable, in terms of its throughlines with classic Greek Myths, but also what makes it so emblematic as an American sports movie. To go through all the trials and tribulations of a classic Greek God and then fail, provoking a deep moral lesson, would be somehow anti-American, if there is an alternative, wherein, despite everything that goes against the character and the broader design of the systems at play against him, he can overcome it in a last second bout of individualism. The man overcomes the system and his ability is not the thing. It’s how he harnesses it and what he does to develop himself. The Natural is not about baseball, exactly, so much as it’s about the realization of our highest selves.
What Robert Redford gives to the performance is also deeply grounded, refined and in the pocket, operating from the angle of another Mythological Character: The Great American Actor. And who better, to represent that, than Robert Redford, who did so much for the film industry, and for aligning others with their purpose in it. Much of that work was done with his foundation of Sundance — which is currently running, in its first year after his passing last year, and its final year in Park City, Utah, before the renowned film festival ships out to Boulder, Colorado, next year. When we’re dealing with a figure who already represents exactly what his characters so often do — the possibility of American greatness, a calm understanding of masculinity, character acting as it was best performed in his time — we do not even need to separate the man from the legend. Robert Redford understood what he represented. It’s because of movies like The Natural that we can come to understand the man for what he was. Mortal but exceptional, the American Dream, a good man worth looking up to. That’s how so many of his characters go.
Baseball offers a helpful pallet for American Myth, especially when the story is rendered with the understanding of the national pastime, not as a competition taken against an opponent, but as a staged measurement of our best selves, playing out across a wide field, with a variety of duties but only one spot at a time where the action is directed. There is, in baseball, already this baked in mythical quality. The early heroes of the sport were lent these larger-than-life attributes. Performance in baseball, because it’s such a series of prescribed events, is also easy to understand and the full virtue of success can be read on a score card. This is part of what The Natural understands and Barry Levinson effectively taps into with it. The movie never gets lost in the sport as a game. It sees the sport as something else, a framing device for moral character, a background for tragic storytelling, a sport where every act is born of intention, where games can be played with full heart or thrown for betting, and it looks just about the same.
Robert Redford is also the right actor to play a baseball player. He played ball, all the way through college. He takes many of the swings and performs the sport out in the movie. It’s not just familiarity. Robert Redford is an actor of the screen. His mannerisms are often minimal, intimate, and magnetic. If you called his acting method “The Natural,” that would sound exactly right — his acting is lived in, and expressed through small movements. Perfect for baseball, where there is some high end performance needed, but also a lot of sitting still. Nobody ever sat still better than Robert Redford.
Then, he’s also capable of moving us to Hope. That’s why he was such a great figurehead for Sundance and the industry. Redford can also move. Something about his register of stillness, when broken by his surety and swiftness in action, makes for a cohesive, whole performance.
Pairing the good performances with the wide open American score by Randy Newman, and the film accomplishes something new for sports films. It finds the American Myth right the heart of Newman’s score, which is influenced by Aaron Copland, who helped defined the sound of the American West. As it’s a Baseball film that sounds like a Western, it also then conveys ambiguity of character — Roy Hobbs, at turns, enters morally gray areas. He is a driven young athlete. A cocksure young pro. Gets gunned down. Comes back with a heart of gold. Turns to greed. Somehow ends up finding redemption.
That’s a god damn cowboy movie. What if The Natural, just as much as it’s a sports picture, and perhaps even more, is a Western? It offers a eulogy for America — because the Dream can only be sold to us through Myth, it is entertainment, not something we can necessarily obtain ourselves. With all this grit, some gun fighting, redemption, femme fatales, the music of the Wild West, and the Sundance Kid right at its center, The Natural for sure fits neatly into one classification: The Great American Movie.