Gus (Clint Eastwood) is a failing baseball scout. His eyes aren’t what they used to be, so his daughter, Mickey (Amy Adams) named for “Mantle” follows him on his Carolina mission to find a pitcher, the one with the right curve ball. Mickey is an attorney by day, who tried to do the right thing to impress a father who was never emotionally there for her, but now she’s emotionally unavailable to him, tapping away on her blackberry. To him, this is a strange world. He’s stuck (circa 1990s) in his world of newspapers and typewriters. Clint played a similar curmudgeon-y character in his film Gran Torino.
Pete (John Goodman) plays a sympathetic colleague who understands the rules of the game while Phil (Matthew Lillard) doesn’t want to believe the old guy anymore…a guy who hears the curve of the ball but can barely see it.
Enter Johnny (Justin Timberlake) a former recruit of Gus’s, who possesses the right dose of humor, kindness and the family-real traits Gus wants in his daughter’s future husband. Johnny’s a former Fenway Park guy who got traded, and it “Bothered Gus
as much as it bothered me. Now he’s scouting for the Red Sox.
It’s wonderful when a good film begins to swirl, all the components of script, director and actors effortlessly playing off each other’s performances. In this case, Timberlake’s softness to Adam’s iciness, maintaining an old-fashioned gentleness of baseball films past. How often can a movie do well without the crutch of slang, blood and blow-ups?
Somewhere along the way Eastwood’s medical issues get cast aside, but this is this year’s Moneyball. The film falls into a league of feel-good baseball greats, and Clint doesn’t talk to any empty er, bleachers. Instead, the old man scores again. But more
importantly, Clint finally did a movie where he didn’t take his shirt off. He left that, thank God, to Justin Timberlake. Three and a half tiaras