by Brett Parker
Trouble with the Curve is a meeting between the time-honored traditions of both a Clint Eastwood movie and a baseball movie, but the film’s great failing is that is has nothing fresh or significant to say about either ideal. We catch on pretty quickly that Eastwood is just going through the motions of still trying to deal with his old coot ways in a modern era--an act we all assumed Eastwood put to literal death in Gran Tarino--and that the game of baseball is merely nothing more than a plot device to allow Eastwood a platform to continue his meditative grumblings. If watching Eastwood do his befuddled growling is entertaining to you--no matter how tired it is this time out--or if you get easily lit up by the graceful charms of Justin Timberlake and Amy Adams, then this film will hold small pleasures for you. Yet if you’re looking for the next Moneyball or Million Dollar Baby, you’ll be pretty disappointed.
Eastwood stars as Gus Lobel, an aging scout for the Atlanta Braves. Gus is secretly having trouble with his eye sight and can no longer asses the skills and mechanics of prospective athletes like he used to. His boss and friend, Pete (John Goodman), senses that Gus’s expert eye is fading, and feels the pressure from his organization to let him go. Making matters worse is a flashy young stats expert (Matthew Lillard) who’s trying to make Gus’s methods as extinct as a dinosaur. While Gus refuses to retire from the only world he’s ever know, it also becomes clear that his latest scouting trip may be the last chance he has to pick a winning player for his team. Realizing this, Pete reaches out to Gus’s estranged daughter, Mickey (Amy Adams), and talks her into accompanying Gus on the road and making sure he’s still able to stay on point with his work and talent.
Mickey isn’t exactly thrilled about this idea, for Gus has always been a negligible and elusive father growing up, and he hasn’t appeared to have changed much in his crusty old ways. So of course old family wounds and paternal conflicts arise between the two as they travel to check out Bo Gentry (Joe Massingill), a magnificently arrogant and surprisingly gifted ballplayer who can crank out home runs with the chunky grandeur of Babe Ruth. Occasionally helping out the father and daughter with their conflicts is Johnny (Justin Timberlake), a former player turned scout who was once discovered by Gus. Johnny mainly turns up to show his support for Gus and assess the situation between Mickey and him, all while giving Mickey an affectionate eye, of course. Suspense hinges on whether or not Gus will be able to pick a golden draft prospect for the Braves’ upcoming season and if he and Mickey will end up reconciling or pushing each other further away.
There was a time when a “Clint Eastwood movie” was classified as Clint with a big gun blowing away bad guys while ideological musings lurk about the bloodshed. Nowadays, it seems to represent flicks where an aging Clint finds his rigid conservative ways of yesteryear under attack from more loose and liberal ideas in a backwards modern era. Usually on standby is family members worried he’ll succumb to his close-minded views to the point of reclusiveness, a female character of some sort who complains about how emotionally unavailable or negligible he is, and youthful, yellow-bellied twerps who Clint is quick to point out doesn’t have the stones to do it like he does it. Trouble with the Curve doesn’t miss a single beat of Clint’s formula, only it feels more like a generic exercise than a work with anything of real consequence to say. Even if Clint still does an effective job of being Old Clint onscreen, we feel he’s just doing a shtick as opposed to expressing something deep within himself.
Since Clint Eastwood and baseball are two of the most mythically celebrated of Americana creations, you’d think putting them together in the same movie would intricately energize each other towards homegrown lyrical poetry. Yet the film’s view of America’s favorite past time is a rather murky one, ping-ponging between idealism and cynicism without any true feeling. On the one hand, baseball is looked at as an organization of plunging morals, from the stat-crunchers who damn near calculate the soul out of the game (an obvious jab at the Moneyball mentality) to the unhealthy-looking prima donna players who buy their own hype (embodied by the effectively nasty Massingill). One especially bizarre development shows a flashback to one of Mickey’s repressed memories that paints the world of baseball as a Hades for degenerate men thats no place for innocent souls. This baffling subplot is filled with such deranged nastiness that to say its unconvincing is an understatement. Yet on the other hand, baseball is finally revealed to be the ode to the American dream we like it to be once a grandly-contrived yet sweetly-satisfying final scene shows an immigrant baseball prodigy (Jay Galloway) getting a chance to try out for the majors, while affirming Gus’s strict code of old school baseball values. It’d be nice to think that the film’s love-hate struggle with baseball mirrors Eastwood’s love-hate relationship with modern America, but this isn’t fleshed out strongly enough and there’s too many stretches in the film where any real feelings for the game are put on the back-burner.
The best reason to see the film is the scene-stealing performance from Amy Adams, who brings a surprising weight and liveliness to the “woman who despairs of Old Clint” role. Adams may be too beautiful to have played off of Eastwood in Million Dollar Baby, but she certainly has the spunk and toughness to go toe-to-toe with him, using her own kind of rigorous stubbornness to challenge his myth. As the boyish and playful modern-day counterpoint to Gus’s old school ways, Justin Timberlake shows up as his usual charming self, and watching his puckishness bounce nicely off of Eastwood’s grouchiness is a thing of slight, incongruent beauty. There’s even time for a nice romance to develop between Adams and Timberlake, since they’re both young, attractive, and care about Gus. This side romance is handled with such warmth and delicacy that you very much wish Eastwood and all the baseball would go away so the film could just be about these two.
You would think Eastwood was in the director’s chair for this one, but that duty has been passed along to Robert Lorenz, an associate of Eastwood’s who served as an assistant director on many of his films. This seems to be a pointless move, for the obvious themes here will easily have future moviegoers mistaking this flick as one of Eastwood’s generic directorial efforts, so he might as well have just bucked it up and directed himself per usual. For seeing this movie as simply Clint still trying to deal with being Clint is the only real validation for its existence. It’s not a bad movie at all, but it’s certainly not necessary at all. It’s also the second most recent baseball movie after Moneyball that holds a fatal lack of humor. What most cinephiles never realize is that Bull Durham’s sense of silliness and mischief says miles more about the greatness of baseball than serious dramas like Trouble with the Curve ever could.
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