John Goodman, Amy Adams and Clint Eastwood shine on the diamond.
In “Trouble With the Curve,” Clint Eastwood’s “Gran Torino” character tells “Moneyball” to get off his lawn, and it’s a baseball field.
Eastwood is delightful as a crusty baseball scout who is losing his sight but not his eye. “He can spot talent from an airplane,” says his fellow Atlanta Braves talent hunter (John Goodman) in one of many pleasing lines. But with his daughter (Amy Adams), a high-priced lawyer who is up for a partnership at her firm, he is rude, odd and irritating. Taking her to a dismal meatloaf-y diner for one of their many frustrating encounters, he asks her whether she needs to borrow money for clothes. “I just came from yoga,” she explains.
A debut film from Eastwood’s longtime producing partner Robert Lorenz, “Trouble With the Curve” could easily pass for one directed by Clint himself, as it revisits many of his signature themes.
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It’s hard to believe this is Clint’s first baseball movie, since the game is such a tidy way of summing up what Clint’s America is about. As Gus (Eastwood) and Mickey (Adams), who is named for Mickey Mantle, hit the road to check out a high school superstar the Braves are thinking about drafting, the movie is as efficient as any baseball flick I’ve seen at tying together the core myths of the game and the country. While it’s partly a genial, warmhearted comedy-drama for oldsters — “Bull Durham” with an ornery prostate — it’s got more on its mind.
The players Gus scouts often come from seedy small towns such as the North Carolina burg where dad and daughter stay in the Grey Squirrel Motel — “LOWEST RAT S IN TOWN” as the signboard calls it.
The film doesn’t push the sentiment too far (except in the slightly ludicrous closing minutes). But at the leisurely pace of baseball, which has changed less than almost anything else in American life over the past 50 years, Lorenz and screenwriter Randy Brown reflect on the last innings of a culture. The film is about games versus work, about human observation versus computer number crunching, about country versus city, swimming holes versus treadmills, hot dog eating versus veganism. Guess where Clint stands on each of these issues.
At times, “Trouble With the Curve” is just as smart as “Moneyball,” which it all but challenges to a fight. The Brad Pitt character in this movie is represented both by Matthew Lillard (a Braves numbers geek who threatens to put poor Gus out of a job without ever leaving his office), and Justin Timberlake, as a washed-up ex-pitcher forced into scouting after a career-ending injury. This film astutely shows how a home run hit off a curve can paradoxically prove a player can’t hit the breaking ball, but the telling detail won’t show up in the scorebook. Take that, Billy Beane.
The scenes with Adams and Eastwood work terrifically, even if they don’t make sense. Would she really desert her law firm at a critical moment to hit the road with a father who is not only superficially prickly but also did her lasting psychological damage as a child? You’d think she would have long since given up. Instead, Mickey does a carefree home-run trot in one scene (one of the sweetest and best in the movie) when it turns out she’s carrying deep pain.
Moreover, the scenes in which she flirts with Timberlake’s character are hard to take. His character is supposed to be bruised and resentful, but J.T. is a showman, not an actor, and he can’t resist cocky smiling and working the charm levers like the boy-band singer he remains. It turns out that when you need internal anguish and a sense of tough luck, Justin Timberlake is not your man.
Baseball movies tend to be lyrical, deeply felt, aggressively metaphorical and (consequently) terrible, but “Trouble With the Curve” has something most others lack: Eastwood’s superb, cruel sense of humor, which reaches all the way back to “Every Which Way But Loose.” Gus finds in baseball what Philo Beddoe found in brawling: the exhilaration of seeing idiots get humiliated.