Trouble With the Curve

Every so often you watch a movie and you realize it's not trying very hard and is the cinematic equivalent of Kraft macaroni and cheese, but you can't help but savor the taste of that powdered cheese. Trouble With the Curve, a film that seems to have been assembled out of a kit, is pretty dumb and has no surprises but gets by with the charisma of its stars.

Clint Eastwood is Gus Lobel, a grizzled old baseball scout. He's basically the same character Eastwood played in Gran Torino, but with an eye for baseball talent. In a direct refutation to Moneyball, Eastwood doesn't believe in computers or statistics but in intangibles that only he can see. Problem: he's starting to go blind.

His daughter, Amy Adams, is a lawyer on the cusp of getting a partnership. She seems to be close to her dad, but there's a lot of baggage there, since her mother died when she was six and he sent her to live with an aunt and uncle, and then to boarding school. When Eastwood's boss, John Goodman, asks her to tag along on a scouting trip to North Carolina, she does so, even though she has to leave work at a critical time in her career.

Everything about this is unchallenging. We get a love interest for Adams with Justin Timberlake as an ex-player turned scout. We get the easy villain, Matthew Lillard, who specializes in these roles. The player Eastwood is scouting is an obnoxious asshole, so of course he will have a flaw in his game that only Eastwood and Adams will detect. And we will get broad stroke psychology that will explain why Adams and Eastwood are the way they are.

But damned if I wasn't just a bit charmed by the end. Everything wraps into a very nice bow, of course, but Eastwood and Adams, and even Timberlake, are too good not to root for. Most of the baseball seems fairly realistic, though I don't think judgements on players are made in such snap decision fashion (the GM, played by Robert Patrick, watches a player throw some tosses and declares he looks like Sandy Koufax).

There's also some problems with the characterization of Adams--we're told that she felt abandoned by her father, and spent years apart from him, yet she's gleaned an amazing amount of talent and inspiration from him, from how to shoot pool to being a font of baseball trivia. Was she close to him or not?

Trouble With the Curve is like an afternoon amateur baseball game--fairly slow, no big surprises, and oddly comforting.