Movies
The Rookie (2002)
Off the Disney conveyor belt of inspirational sports stories comes the real-life odyssey of Jim Morris, high-school science teacher and extracurricular baseball coach in Big Lake, Texas, whose own pitching career was cut short by shoulder surgery, then revived when he tried out, on a dare from his players, for the Tampa Bay Devil Rays and made it to the "bigs" at the age of thirty-five. (The movie makes him out to be thirty-nine, maybe to conform closer to the actual age of forty-eight-year-old Dennis Quaid, or maybe out of concern that the average viewer would not be duly amazed at the younger age.) There's a certain family-film blandness to the thing, and yet there is also a fine feel for the Dust Bowl dreariness of the setting, and for the second-class status of the sport of baseball in the heart of football country. (While automatic sprinklers maintain the immaculate turf of the gridiron, a pack of deer gobble up the seeds on the dirt diamond.) And the entire last act of the drama -- the hero's wide-eyed arrival at the palatial Ballpark at Arlington, the finding of his locker and uniform in the clubhouse, the limbering up in the bullpen in front of the Texas home folks, the entrance onto the playing field, the first batter faced -- is a payoff tantamount to an escalator to heaven. This is not (what the hero had fantasized as a boy) the seventh game of the World Series; it is only a mop-up relief appearance in a blowout. But that's several miles beside the point. With Rachel Griffiths, Brian Cox, Beth Grant, Jay Hernandez, Russell Richardson; directed by John Lee Hancock. 2002.
Reader Rating:
MPAA Rating: G