The Natural

An otherwise fine sports fantasy is dragged down by an overindulgence in sentimentality. Read full review

Somewhat overly sentimental, lacking the novel's subtlety, and less interesting when the action leaves the ball park, Barry Levinson's beautifully shot film is nonetheless a charming fairy tale. Read full review

This flirts dangerously with the cornball. But for the most part The Natural is rescued by its fine polish: the gravity balanced by wry, sneaky humor, the rosiness tempered by darkness and disquiet, the fairy-tale vision dressed up in impeccably detailed period dress. [28 May 1984, p.77]

Why didn't they make a baseball picture? Why did The Natural have to be turned into idolatry on behalf of Robert Redford? Why did a perfectly good story, filled with interesting people, have to be made into one man's ascension to the godlike, especially when no effort is made to give that ascension meaning? Read full review

Mr. Levinson, who both wrote and directed Diner, the small, exquisitely realized comedy about growing up aimless in Baltimore, here seems to be at the service of other people's decisions. Though entertaining in short stretches, The Natural has no recognizable character of its own. Read full review

It would be a gigantic understatement to say that Barry Levinson's 1984 film version compromises the original ending, given that it concludes with perhaps the most spectacularly triumphant swing in movie history. And yet as much as it betrays the tragic underpinnings of Malamud's story, the phony ending remains the film's most powerful sequence, earning an ironic place in baseball's iconography. Read full review

With Redford, less is not more, less is nigh on to nothing. He's natural in The Natural, but he's artless: it has been years since he played the politician in The Candidate, but he's still running for office on screen. The gig he wants is God, and that's what he gets to play in The Natural, a Greek deity with an arm made of home runs and a halo made of Sun-In. [11 May 1984]

A moment or two between Richard Farnsworth and Wilford Brimley recall the verbal skills of Levinson's Diner; the rest of the film is bloatedly “visual”: blinding backlighting, grandiose slow motion, overstudied montage. Read full review

There isn't a whisper of surprise in Redford's performance, and he's photographed looking like a wary, modest god, with enough backlighting and soft focus to make him incandescent even when he isn't doing a thing.