Redford's pause before mentioning his father shows his MIND at work, filled with nostalgia, warmth and finally being at peace with his life's direction. What an actor. Someone smarter than me once said that the best acting is between the lines.
@@mikerotonda6264 The mistake people make about this movie (including critics like Roger Ebert, who should have known better) is thinking that it's about baseball. It isn't. Baseball is the vehicle. The destination is redemption.
@@danielstoddart Ebert had probably already read Malamud's 1952 novel. It's a dark morality tale with no redemption at the end. Your sins - and youthful indiscretions - follow you to your grave. Hobbs strikes out, Max Mercy runs the story, and a kid asks Roy as he's leaving town, "Say it ain't so, Roy, say it ain't so." But Levinson & the producers didn't have the guts to end it that way. There's a certain cognitive dissonance in giving it a happy ending. As if people like the Judge aren't always the winners in real life, because they rig the game to make sure they can't lose.
I saw this film as a teenaged baseball player and now as a father of a teenaged baseball player it’s more true than ever. My son is a fine young man and he may become many things but in my mind he will always be a baseball player. Always.
It's the halo effect and it's repeated many times in the movie, including when he strikes out the Whammer. It's used to indicate Hobbs is a type of Galahad, the pure and chosen one.
That masterful transition from talking back and forth through the mirror almost like a sparring match to when Pop turned around and looked at Roy face to face!
As a young man, Roy Hobbs says he wants people to say he was the best baseball player there ever was. And in this scene, he hears that very thing from a baseball lifer he respects.
The use of light, shadows, and the mirror in this scene is cinematic genius. That masterful transition from talking back and forth through the mirror almost like a sparring match to when Pop turns around and looks at Roy face to face! The entire movie tells the story through light and darkness. You don't even need the words to follow the story.
Roy Hobbs wanted the world to recognize him as the best hitter anyone ever saw, but shit happens. SO he made the most of what was left and in doing that a true redemption took place.
Randy Newman. Also scored many other movies including all 4 Toy Story movies. Nominated for 15 Oscars before he finally won one on his 16th try, for Best Original Song (2001's "If I Don't Have You' from 'Monsters, Inc.'). He did win a Grammy for Best Instrumental Composition for the score of 'The Natural'.
There are certain elements about the sport of baseball, including its history, cultural impact, and gameplay, that make it the perfect backdrop for a movie. But what this film explores is the myth of baseball, and there be giants here!
The light in this movie was critically important (lighting, the sun, the darkness in the judges office, the lights of the photographers, and the end when he hits the lights with the HR) so watching Roy stand there with the sun ☀ in his hair was done to show he was touched by the almighty!
One of the few movies that surpasses the novel it's based on. I love the line: "Nothing like being around animals. Fixin' things." I'm an accountant. The things I fix are mostly ones and zeroes. But i do like fixing things, and I think about this line every time I do.
Looking at this scene again many years later, I imagine that the Knights likely got swept in the World Series after Roy’s walk-off homer against the Pirates. Roy likely wouldn’t have played in the Series as that would have been too risky with his illness. The Knights couldn’t win without him. The World Series itself would have been anticlimactic after Roy’s homer. And as Pop says himself, he doesn’t care about the Series. He’d been satisfied with the pennant and bought a farm.
Notice that the cinematography put a halo on Redford? Quite the allegory, isn't it? Just like the halo on Glenn Close when the streak was broken... Some coincidence, eh?
Both indicate almost sacred purity. Roy loses his when he starts to be corrupted by the treacherous Memo (Basinger) but regains it while recuperating in the hospital.
@Troll Mctrollerson What a dishonest, willfully, ignorant, and blatantly hypocritical twit you are. None of you conservitards have any morals, no ethics, no redeeming qualities whatsoever. And none of you would know what the truth was if it reached up and slapped you across your feckless head. The lot of you are fascists, selfish, hateful, malignant souls with no virtues at all, and you dare sit there and try to label someone else.
One of the cruelest things that the human race has to live with is .............. "old age", he has 10 years on me but I doubt I would look like him in 10 years time.
Honestly, yes if he hadn't gotten into drugs. When he was gone for 4 years on a bender, he came back, played a couple weeks in the minors, then hit like 20 home runs in a half season. Gone 4 years doing nothing but drugs or ever playing in an mlb game. Are you kidding?
