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Nostalgic
‘The Natural’
I’m not really sure that one could make a solid argument that baseball is still America’s pasttime — it’s gotta be football these days, right? Even with that said, no one can argue that there’s ever been a football movie that works as well as The Natural. This 1984 masterpiece is a quintessentially American fable about collision: collision between amber waves of grain and concrete jungles, collision between idealism and greed, collision between tradition and modernity. (Let’s not forget the collision of flesh and bullets, either.) Robert Redford stars as Roy Hobbs, a baseball phenom from the heartlands who gets led astray by the temptations of the big city as a young man, only to find redemption by returning to his roots (spiritually, romantically) as an older man. It’s a miracle of cinema, one that inspires uniquely American feelings in anyone who sees it. “There goes the best that ever was” is something that can be said about Roy Hobbs, about Robert Redford, and some might even say about The Natural itself.
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