The Natural (Movie)

There are several things that are all true about the Robert Redford movie The Natural, the baseball story that “adapts” Bernard Malamud’s novel of the same name to the screen.

• It is a shallow and sugary but well-shot and well-made movie.
• It is about as faithful to the original novel as a Minnesota politician is to her husband.
• It’s perhaps the most prominent sports alternate history ever made.

The first part needs the least explanation, except to highlight how amazing Randy Newman’s score is. The second part is the more interesting to explain. See, the novel is in many ways just as shallow as the movie, while being far more mean spirited and, frankly, dull. One great inherent part about filmmaking is that via the trick of “the ball hits something which goes boom”, you can see what awesome thing Roy Hobbs did instead of just having someone say “he lead the league in homers and triples and hit lots of home runs until his character brought him down.”

The final point needs some attention. See, Roy Hobbs and the New York Knights obviously did not actually exist, much less win the 1939 National League pennant. But a more important thing is that instead of taking place in a vague “sometime in the past” the way the book did, this has a specific date (1939), and said date is several decades before the filming and release of the movie. If that’s not alternate history, than what is?