Not Necessarily the Best There Ever Was ... But Close

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"I guess some mistakes you never stop paying for."

Roy Hobbs (Robert Redford)

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I don't know if "The Natural" was particularly inspirational. Its subject matter, after all, was probably the kind of thing that most kids have been fantasizing about forever — being the best at something.

Sometimes those dreams come true. More often, they do not.

I thought of my own boyhood dreams when I saw "The Natural" not long after it premiered 30 years ago today. I wasn't very athletic when I was younger, but I fantasized about it. Who wouldn't? When you're an awkward teenager, any scenario in which your buddies hoist you on their shoulders and parade you around in triumph — and all the girls want to be with you — is as valuable as one of Walter Mitty's daydreams.

(Come to think of it, Mitty's heroic fantasies usually ended unhappily, just short of achieving his goals.)

When I see "The Natural" now, I am more inclined to think of Roy Hobbs' perseverance, his dedication to his dream, his desire to follow that rainbow wherever it led — even though he had been, to use his own word, "sidetracked."

I guess he summed up his heart's desire when he was talking about how differently his life had been than he had expected. If he had begun his major–league career when most players do, in their 20s, he speculated that he could have rewritten the record book. "And then when I walked down the street people would've looked and they would've said, 'There goes Roy Hobbs, the best there ever was in this game.' "

It's corny, I know, but sometimes you need some corn. What happened to Roy Hobbs is the kind of thing that can happen to people in any walk of life, especially when they get blindsided by something beyond their control. It's worse for an athlete, I suppose, because an athlete's window of opportunity is so brief. People in non–athletic walks of life can afford to be more patient; the clock ticks loudly for a sidetracked athlete.

Roy wasn't bitter. He was a little wistful at times, but it just made him more determined to make the most of the time he had left.

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Apparently, movie critic Roger Ebert wasn't impressed.

"Why didn't they make a baseball picture?" Ebert wanted to know. "Why did 'The Natural' have to be turned into idolatry on behalf of Robert Redford?"

That wasn't the way I saw it then, nor is it the way I see it now.

But Ebert felt that audiences knew too much about Hobbs' character and not enough about the other people on screen. "I'd love to get to know Pop Fisher (Wilford Brimley), the cynical, old team manager," Ebert wrote. "Robert Duvall, as the evil sportswriter, Max Mercy, has had his part cut so badly that we only know he's evil because he practically tells us. Richard Farnsworth, as a kindly coach, has a smile that's more genuine than anything else in the movie. But you have to look quick."

There were some things about Hobbs that we didn't know — like where he had been for 16 or 17 years

OK, it's a Robert Redford movie. I didn't have a problem with that. His was the bankable name in 1984, even though his star was falling while Glenn Close's was rising. (In case you never saw the movie before, Close was Redford's childhood sweetheart in the movie.)

Redford was the reason why people paid to see that movie. And pay they did. "The Natural," which was made for $28 million, took in nearly $48 million at the box office.

I've seen many movies that were focused on a single character — seemingly to the exclusion of everything else. I thought "The Natural" handled that better than most. It had a pretty good story. Most such movies do not. And, unlike Ebert, I had no quarrel over the amount of screen time everyone else got.

The young Roy Hobbs ran into problems with a mysterious woman (played by Barbara Hershey) he met on a train. In a sense, isn't that every man's story? Well, not every man, I suppose, but many a young man has fallen from grace because of a pretty face.

And Roy Hobbs fell hard. He dropped out of sight for years, finally resurfacing as an older man trying to break in with a struggling baseball team.

He didn't know all the intrigue behind the scenes. He didn't know that Pop Fisher, minority team owner in addition to being its manager, had made a deal with the principal owner. If the team won the pennant, Pop got the team. If the team didn't win the pennant, the principal owner got all of Pop's shares. Winner take all.

Hobbs' arrival complicated things. The team was well on its way to losing the pennant, but Hobbs turned things around to the point where the principal owner had to bribe him to play badly. He wouldn't do it, promising to "hit away."

I think this is where Ebert really objected. Redford, apparently bleeding and in pain from his stomach injury, hit the dramatic home run that won the pennant — and ran around the bases amid a shower of sparks from the stadium light fixture he blasted with his mighty shot. OK, it was a little over the top.

It was "cheap and phony," Ebert wrote.

"Either he hits the homer and then dies, or his bleeding was just a false alarm," Ebert explained. "If the bleeding was a false alarm, then everything else in the movie was false, too."

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Yes, except that this is the movies, not real life. A lot of things happen in the movies that are implausible in real life.

I admit, Ebert had a point when he observed that Close was "the childhood sweetheart who doesn't hear from Roy after an accident changes the course of his life. Then she turns up years later, and when she stands up in the bleachers she is surrounded by blinding light ... In the few moments she's allowed alone with Roy, she strikes us as complicated, tender, and forgiving. But even the crucial fact of her life — that she has borne this man's son — is used as a plot gimmick."

OK, Close did have a kind of beatific look on her face when she was around Redford later in the movie. I didn't really notice it when they played young lovers, but it was noticeable when they were reunited roughly 20 years later.

See, I was a child of the Nixon years. Pat Nixon always had that kind of look on her face.

Are there things about the movie that I would have done differently? Sure, but it was what it was. And, for what it was, I thought it was good. Maybe better than good.

It belonged on a list of the best sports movies. There are sports movies that I like more — the ones that deal with actual events and people (like "Eight Men Out" and "Miracle") are my favorites — but the fictional ones can be pretty good, too, and "The Natural" told a pretty good story.

Making a Supreme Selection

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Evelyn Baker Lang (Glenn Close): [Reviewing how she'd respond to a Senate question during a confirmation hearing] If you're Webster, the question is "Where do you stand on Roe v. Wade?" and the answer is "Judicial rulings shouldn't be based on personal ideology, mine or anyone else's." If you're Davies, the question is "How would you approach a D&X case?" because he's the drum banger on partial birth. And the answer is "I don't comment on hypotheticals." If you're Malkin, you're from Virginia, so you ask a de jure. I take you point by point from the doctor to the father to Casey to undue burden to equal protection back to Roe at which point you can't remember the question and I drink my water for a minute while you regroup.

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I'd like to think — and I hope most Americans would like to think — that every White House treats its obligation to nominate justices to fill Supreme Court vacancies as a solemn and sacred responsibility, always aware of the historical significance and the future implications of every nomination — with little attention paid to the political consequences.

(The Georgetown Law Library's website perpetuates that noble image: "[T]he President has the power, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, to appoint Judges of the Supreme Court. Since Supreme Court Justices are appointed for life, each nomination to the Supreme Court has a long–lasting influence on the Court and on the day–to–day life of every American.")

But the truth is that, like everything else that happens in Washington, the process is almost entirely political.

The episode of the West Wing that aired 10 years ago tonight, "The Supremes," was about that process.

It began with the death of a Supreme Court justice, and the liberal Bartlet White House had to select a replacement that could win the approval of the conservative majority in Congress. Initially, the president (Martin Sheen) was prepared to nominate a centrist (Robert Picardo), but he refused to take a position on any issue when he met with Bartlet.

His logic wasn't hard to understand. He said he didn't take sides until he had heard all the evidence in a particular case. He was preserving his initial neutrality. As a result, depending upon the facts, he might be on one side of an issue in one case and on the other side of the same issue in another.

That made him a bit too much of a wild card for Bartlet.

Ideologically, Bartlet would have preferred to nominate someone like the female judge (Glenn Close) who was asked in for an interview with White House staffers during their search.

She wowed the staffers who vetted her, too.

"I love her," Josh (Bradley Whitford) told speech writer Toby Ziegler (Richard Schiff) when they excused themselves to confer in private. "I love her mind. I love her shoes."

"Your work on the 14th Amendment in particular is the stuff that dreams were made of," gushed Toby when they were back in the room.

But she knew the conservatives in Congress would never approve her. Her record in general was too far to the left for them, but she was especially concerned about a heretofore hidden personal matter she felt certain would come out — that she had had an abortion when she was in law school.

She was content to be window dressing for whoever the eventual nominee turned out to be, but she knew that she could never be the choice.

The majority in Congress would prefer someone more like the conservative judge played by William Fichtner, but Bartlet couldn't do that.

(Personally, I always felt the scene in which Josh and Toby presented that particular name to Bartlet was one of the series' best. The camera never left the reception area. The president's secretary {Lily Tomlin} ushered Josh and Toby into the Oval Office, then went about her business while Vivaldi played on her radio. Behind the closed door, the president's anguished "No!" could be heard; his secretary calmly — and wordlessly — turned up the music on the radio and continued with her business.)

So there was an apparent impasse between the two branches of government, and it seemed that the oft–repeated caveat (in the West Wing universe) mdash; that the Supreme Court's destiny was to be centrist straight down the line — was coming true.

That's when Toby and Josh came up with a scheme, one that they hoped would breathe new life into a branch of government that was perceived as having grown stale and predictable with its overwhelming centrism.

(In reality, I am not so sure of that — but that underscores what is probably the hardest thing to keep in mind when you watch the West Wing. It was fiction, not documentary.)

Toby and Josh approached the chief justice (Milo O'Shea) about resigning, at which time, they said, the president would nominate Close to be the new chief justice and Fichtner to fill the associate justice vacancy.

The chief justice was intrigued and agreed to step down.

One of the things that I always appreciated about the West Wing was its ability to educate as it entertained. OK, I know that most of the people who watched the show probably forgot the history or social studies lesson that was taught before they went to bed, but I still appreciated the effort.

Having said that, though, I would be remiss if I didn't mention something that jumped out at me the first time I saw the episode. I guess my background in history and social studies made it inevitable that I would notice something that almost no one else would notice.

The West Wing writers usually were meticulous about their facts, but they really messed up in "The Supremes."

At the end of the episode, when Martin Sheen introduced the two Supreme Court nominees, he introduced Close's character as "the next chief justice of the Supreme Court." While, technically, it is true that the chief justice presides over the Supreme Court, the chief justice, as the highest–ranking judicial officer in the country, has the official title of Chief Justice of the United States.

You have just had your teachable moment for today.

A Tangled Web

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Marquise de Merteuil (Glenn Close): One does not applaud the tenor for clearing his throat.

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On this day 25 years ago, I was finishing up my first semester of graduate school. I had completed my final exams, and I was looking for something special to do to celebrate.

"Dangerous Liaisons," with John Malkovich, Glenn Close and Michelle Pfeiffer, was making its premiere 25 years ago today. It was a Friday, and I decided to go to the theater on Monday. (I worked for a mostly afternoon paper in those days, and my days off were Sunday and Monday. I spent Sundays watching football with my father so Monday seemed like the best time.)

There wasn't much of a crowd the day I saw it — which was kind of surprising. It was a week before Christmas, and schools were out. The malls were busy, and I would have figured that some people would have taken a couple of hours to watch a movie.

But, if they did, they were watching something else.

That was OK with me, though, because I didn't have to struggle to hear the dialogue, which crackled in a way that movie scripts seldom do. Maybe that's because it was based on an 18th–century novel — which may have been the reason moviegoers were scared off. If so, that was a shame because they missed out on an entertaining movie experience.

"Dangerous Liaisons" earned back more than twice what was spent to make it, and there were those who regarded that as a success, but its box–office take was exceeded by dozens of other movies that were released that year.

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Vicomte de Valmont (John Malkovich): Now, I think we might begin with one or two Latin terms.

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It had a kind of "Midsummer Night's Dream" quality to it.

The acting was first rate. Glenn Close played a member of the French nobility who had a virtuous reputation but was, in reality, a scheming and manipulative woman. She decided to have her revenge on a former lover by having his fiancee (Uma Thurman) seduced by another man, thus humiliating the former lover, and the instrument of the seduction would be an equally manipulative character played by John Malkovich.

Well, that was the plan.

The conflict for Malkovich's character was that he was already otherwise occupied with trying to seduce a chaste character played by Michelle Pfeiffer, who was staying with Malkovich's aunt (Mildred Natwick in her final role). But he changed his mind when he learned that Pfeiffer had been warned about him by the mother of Thurman's character (Swoosie Kurtz), and he turned his attention to Thurman.

Thurman's character, incidentally, had fallen in love with her music teacher (Keanu Reeves) who was not, in Kurtz's eyes, suitable for her daughter.

It's all kind of complicated to explain in print. It's much easier to follow when one watches the movie.

It is interesting, in hindsight, to contemplate what might have been. Drew Barrymore and Sarah Jessica Parker could have had the part that eventually went to Thurman. I find it hard to imagine either of those actresses bringing the freshness and naivete that Thurman brought to the role.

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At the Oscars, Close and Pfeiffer were nominated for awards but lost. The movie was nominated for Best Picture and Best Original Score but lost those as well. It won for adapted screenplay, costume design and art direction.

Malkovich and director Stephen Frears were not nominated.

On the subject of the music, I was gratified by the soundtrack, which included compositions from a virtual who's who of baroque and classical composers — Bach, Handel, Vivaldi — but, interestingly, even though the story took place in France, no music by French composers was heard.

Chillin' With the Gang

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Michael (Jeff Goldblum): Amazing tradition. They throw a great party for you on the one day they know you can't come.

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It's a funny thing about "The Big Chill" — which made its theatrical debut 30 years ago today.

I can't remember seeing it at a theater, although I am certain that is where I first saw it. And I can't remember watching it when it came to cable about a year later, although I know I did — several times.

What I remember about "The Big Chill" is not an occasion when I saw it. It is an occasion when I thought about it a great deal.

It was sometime in the spring of 1991, about 7½ years after the movie made its theatrical debut. The occasion was a phone conversation I had with someone back in my home state of Arkansas. Funny, but I can't remember with whom I had the conversation. I can only remember the subject — a mutual friend had been diagnosed with terminal cancer.

My thoughts were drawn to "The Big Chill" and its tale of friends who came together for the funeral of a mutual friend from college, the most talented of the bunch, who had committed suicide.

I didn't go to college with my friend, but I did meet him through friends I made in college in that way that friendship networks often evolve. And I don't know if he would have been considered the most talented member of our group.

He certainly didn't commit suicide.

But there were so many moments in "The Big Chill" that seemed to fit our situation. I guess it had to do with the fact that we were young, like the group of friends in "The Big Chill," and we were dealing with the premature loss of a member of our group.

After my phone conversation was over, I remember sitting in silence in my apartment — for how long, I do not know — thinking about "The Big Chill." I thought of other things, too — memories of happier times — but I did think about "The Big Chill" quite a lot.

The next day, in the newsroom where I worked, I was telling a couple of co–workers about my phone conversation. The managing editor was standing nearby and listening. When I finished telling the story of the phone conversation, the M.E. said, "Did you think about 'The Big Chill?' "

I didn't answer. I didn't know what to say.

But it was on my mind.

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My circle of friends was never as prosperous as the ones in "The Big Chill," but when we gathered for our friend's funeral, it was a lot like the movie. That was what struck me about it.

The surroundings weren't the same. The movie took place in a kind of rambling, antebellum Southern home; our gathering was in an apartment. It was in the South, but that was the only surface similarity.

The emotions were certainly the same for us, though, and we sought some meaning in what had happened.

The folks in "The Big Chill" watched a football game to renew their bonds. We watched a movie.

We even had our equivalent of Meg Tilly's character — younger than the rest of us, a bit naive and really unacquainted with the person for whom we were grieving.

(Tilly's character actually was acquainted with the deceased — played in an obviously nonspeaking role by Kevin Costner. Our tangential character never met our friend and constantly sought to cheer us up — as if we had all taken the same chemistry test and done poorly on it.

(Tilly wasn't quite that removed. She had been the deceased's girlfriend prior to his suicide — but some of the similarities were, well, spooky.)

"The Big Chill" managed to walk a fine line between humor and drama, and Tilly's character was a perfect blend of both. Sometimes, admittedly, it was hard to take her seriously, but then she would say something that would knock you off your feet.

Like when she and the other characters were talking about happiness and happy people, and the group looked to her for some insight.

"I don't know very many happy people," she protested.

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That was the conundrum that the baby boomers — played by Glenn Close, Jeff Goldblum, JoBeth Williams, Kevin Kline, Tom Berenger, Mary Kay Place and William Hurt — faced. Their futures didn't seem to be living up to the expectations of their pasts — even if, on the surface, everything seemed to be on track.

That isn't unique to the baby boomer generation, of course, but it still seems to come as something of a shock to every generation.

They hadn't been together in quite awhile so there was a lot of catching up to do — and, apparently, some unresolved issues and unrequited loves that made for interesting, and sometimes poignant, subplots. My group hadn't been apart nearly as long, and there wasn't nearly as much drama, but there was a similar longing to recapture the past in some way — or at least rewrite some of the episodes.

It's been my experience that most people, at some point in their lives, attempt to relive the past or evaluate it in some way, and "The Big Chill" was an excellent study of characters of the baby boom generation staring into the abyss of middle age — and, for the most part, not caring for what they saw.