An honest baseball movie
The more interesting though not necessarily better sports movies aim at revealing the cynicism behind the gloss of athletic spectacle. I'm thinking of The Harder They Fall, North Dallas 40, and let's say Rollerball, just for fun.
But most sports films, to grossly generalize, drive to the hoop by depicting an athlete wielding his love for the game to triumph over such cynicism. Here, you've got your Rocky, your Karate Kid, your Field of Dreams, and your Bull Durham (my all-time fave). Baseball in particular has proven fertile ground for such redemptive plots, in films that live in a category all by themselves: the mytho-poetic. As befits a sport that has managed to embed itself into the national consciousness as a “pastime,” connoting fields of green; and lazy, sun-dappled afternoons in which time itself seems to stand still (and if you've ever watched Steve Trachsel pitch, it actually does).
Baseball has inspired more meditative essays than all the other sports combined. "Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn
baseball, the rules and realities of the game," wrote historian Jacques Barzun. I'm a huge baseball fan, but I'd go with football - or better yet, mixed martial arts - if you're really interested in American innards.
Still, among sports, only baseball truly merits literary treatment. Baseball has been the subject of at least two first-rate books: Bernard Malamud’s The Natural and Robert Coover’s The Universal Baseball Association, Inc. It's the only sport that could sustain a 10-part Ken Burns documentary or anchor a George Carlin monologue.
Baseball has frequently been used by filmmakers as a proxy for Americans' self-described values. In Meet John Doe, an ex-baseball player played by Gary Cooper is the quintessentially ingenuous American. Baseball in that film becomes the natural occupation of the naif, content to spend his adult years playing a boy's game, whose innocence is exploited and turned against him and his fellow good eggs by a crypto-fascist. Pride of the Yankees is all about Gehrig's big speech, in which the dying star proclaims himself to be “the luckiest man on the face of the earth." Again, Gary Cooper stars, the laconic American who enters into a state of grace by facing death with stoical dignity.
Baseball is so embedded in our national consciousness that the myth-makers have had no trouble in adapting it to changing American mores. Post-Ball Four, Jim Bouton's groundbreaking dismantling of baseball culture as a topic suitable for fifth-grade filmstrips, the soft-spoken towers of strength in hagiographic biopics gave way to hedonistic rowdies exercising their right to pursue crasser pleasures than embodying a national idyll who also remembers to hit the cut-off man. Ted Danson's Sam Malone on "Cheers" is a recovering alcoholic and a practicing sex addict, but his jocky good nature and ability to stymie a pretentious female smartypants is both an indictment of and an homage to Americans alternative national pastime: bashing intellectuals. (CONTINUED)
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