Movie Review

Just to get out for awhile, I saw Trouble with the Curve last night. The Clint Eastwood baseball movie was a very nicely done story that seems like it might be Eastwood's argument against Brad Pitt's Moneyball.

Eastwood's pretty good at playing the crochety old geezer, almost the same character he played in Gran Torino a couple years ago.  Yet his subtle performance grants the audience a peek at his inner guilt and regret over his neglect of his daughter, played by the gorgeous Amy Adams.

Even though Adams made the film for me, as the competent yet emotionally fragile attorney daughter, her performance in the more dramatic scenes of confrontation with Eastwood was too over-the-top.  It's not believable to me that the adult 30-something daughter would use such melodrama when she tried to talk with her father about the pain of her childhood abandonment.

She was called "emotionally unavailable" by Justin Timberlake, which should have meant her character dealt with her emotional conflicts with her father in much a more subtle and stoic manner.  She would have been much more effective if her approach had been more like Eatwood's.  Great drama doesn't always require tears and a raised voice ending with her stalking out of the room.

Timberlake wasn't bad as the love interest for Adams' character, but he's far from believable as an ex-major league pitcher.  He doesn't look like a guy who could get a baseball all the way to the plate, let alone one who had a 100MPH fastball.

John Goodman was terrific and believable as Eastwood's beleagered boss, who's trying to hang on to his job against the younger, aggressively ambitious Matthew Lillard, who I mostly remember as Shaggy from the Scooby-Do movies.

 The ending was especially contrived, but for some reason I didn't mind much.  In the real world it would have taken at least a year or two for the Atlanta Braves to figure out Eastwood's scouting was right and Lillard's computer models were wrong, and that first draft pick was a bust.  It also seems nearly impossible that the young pitching phenom Adams' character brought to the organization off the street would actually be given a chance to throw against the draft pick in front of the entire Braves management team.  But I understand the story needed a quick resolution.

The movie makes a pretty good case for the human touch in scouting talent versus reliance on computer models and statistics.  I'm pretty sure both have a place, just like everything else in the modern world.  Computers are tools that help get work done faster, not magic boxes that can make all our decisions for us without the interjection of human judgement.