Swinging for the Fences

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

THE NATURAL Directed by Barry Levinson Screenplay by Roger Towne and Phil Dusenberry

In myth, baseball is a circle of light in a world increasingly darkened by corruption. It is a clean, green place that absorbs, preserves and reflects back upon us, through the heroically magnified deeds of its adepts, the purity with which, as children open to and eager for enchantment, we first encountered it. This game is a mind game, an ideal, and one that seems an almost lost legend for which people nowadays mourn, as they do for many things that graced a more leisurely and miraculous time. But baseball is also a reality, a game played by ungrammatical men who, like most people, have grown up without necessarily growing wise. They chew tobacco, indulge in alcoholic beverages and do not always fend off the groupies with the fervor expected of moral exemplars.

In all the literature that the sport has inspired, it is Bernard Malamud who best combined the mythic and the realistic streams of America's baseball consciousness. The Natural, published in 1952, reads as if Ring Lardner and Sir Thomas Malory had simultaneously invaded Malamud's sensibility, joining their gifts to produce an almost flawless first novel.

His tale was of Roy Hobbs, a ballplayer possessed of a talent and an innocence that could only have their sources in the supernatural. In Malamud's baseball world, like Malory's Arthurian one, men are ever the victims; it is women who have the power to make them betray their best selves as well as the ability to inspire them to redemptive glory. In Roy's case, all unknowing on the eve of his big league tryout, he answers a mysterious woman's summons to her hotel room where she shoots him (with a silver bullet, no less).

Still unaware of the forces playing about him, he achieves the illusion of redemption through 15 years of backroads wanderings, false heroic regeneration by using his magic bat as a kind of Excalibur, leading the aptly named New York Knights on a charge out of the league cellar toward the pennant. But he becomes a true hero to modernist eyes only when, ambiguously but courageously (and with a good woman's help), he achieves awareness of what his life and adventures mean. In literary circles this is known as coming to consciousness; in the on-deck circle it is known as growing up.

It is easy to see why the notion of adapting this story has tempted moviemakers for three decades. Hollywood's self-referential myths, far more than baseball's, revolve around the seduction and betrayal of the innocent. But now that the deed is done, it is equally easy to see how this material can lead even the most conscientious and respectful writers and directors astray. The problem is that the true life of this novel, for all the bustling melodrama of its surface, is inward; its highest pleasures are to be found in the silence it maintains about its deepest thoughts. It tips these only in a descriptive fragment here, a line of laconic, often funny dialogue there. It is perfectly possible to read the novel and enjoy it as if it had been written by that best of boys' book writers, John R. Tunis.

Up to a point Director Barry Levinson (Diner) seems to understand all this. His actors assuredly do. As Hobbs, Robert Redford has never been better. The good lines are in his face now, and they reflect experience knowingly squinted at. A lefty who moves like the ballplayer he once wanted to be, he has, like all the truly great movie stars, the ability to appear as if he has transcended acting and can now simply behave a part like this. Robert Duvall, as the sportswriter-cartoonist who thinks truth is to be found only in facts, plays crudeness with enormous subtlety, and Glenn Close provides similar service by hinting at the complexity inherent in what is often referred to as simple goodness. No actors have played the dry wisdom of age with more youthful juiciness than Wilford Brimley and Richard Farnsworth as the skipper and the coach of the Knights. The rest of the cast, and the brilliant production designers as well, have also found their ways to emulate Malamud's disciplined illusionism, hewing to a realistic line and letting the mythic chips fly (seemingly) where they may.

It is, however, the curse of the aesthetically aware that they must (a) demonstrate the quality they most highly prize in themselves and (b) make sure those they fear may be sleeping in f the back of the class catch their ; drift. Therefore Malamud's intricate ending (it is a victory that "looks like a defeat) is vulgarized (the victory is now an unambiguous triumph, fireworks included). But long before that, all the linkages between far-flung people and events, which the novel was content to leave looking coincidental, have been neatly knotted, so that watching this movie is all too often like reading about The Natural in the College Outline series. Its academic air is further thickened by the visual style Levinson has adopted for it. Backlighting and diffused light, shadows, silhouettes and slow motion, all the camera tricks that signify a departure from ordinary movie realism and the presence of symbolic meaning in a shot, are indiscriminately, even promiscuously thrown at the audience. Quiet everybody! The professor is interpreting for us. And even when he is just outlining the plot, Levinson is illustrating it with slides that look like Hopper paintings and Farm Security Administration photographs, while imitation Copland burbles out of the phono graph in the corner. Yes, the material is mythic. But it is an American myth, Bub, and don't you forget it.

The Natural prompts some thoughts about the difference between a creative and an interpretive artist. In his youthful strength Malamud could stride up to his material looking free and easy and swing away at it. Hoping for a single, he was probably as surprised as anyone when he hit one out of the park. Following him, Levinson must have felt he had to swing for the fences. He can be forgiven for choking up with all The Natural's fans looking on dubiously. In fairness, the official scorer must credit him with a single. And Redford with an RBI.

--By Richard Schickel