CURVE APPEAL

Having thrown a curve himself last month at the Republican National Convention—your own politics will probably determine whether or not you think he threw it for a strike—Clint Eastwood stays in the stands in Trouble with the Curve. But this time, the stands are where the action is. Both the speech and the movie make the same point, however—that Clint isn’t a kid anymore.

Clint plays Gus Lobel, a scout for the Atlanta Braves, veteran of decades of sitting in the stands with a notebook at high school games. Never exactly a ray of sunshine, Gus has been turned by old age into a snarling coot. His anger is understandable—it’s hard to pee in the mornings, and he needs a magnifying glass to read the paper. He can’t use a computer or any of the new statistical methods for evaluating players. But his real problem, professionally speaking, is the macular degeneration that’s placed a blurry horizontal band across the middle of his vision—right through his view of the strike zone.

A longtime widower, Gus has an emotionally distant relationship with his daughter Mickey (Amy Adams), an overachieving lawyer. An odious young whippersnapper (Matthew Lillard) in the Braves front office wants the GM (Robert Patrick) to get rid of Gus, whose contract is nearly up anyway, so Mickey risks losing a partnership at her firm to join Gus in rural North Carolina, and be his eyes as he scouts a slugging prospect.

While she’s there, Mickey—she’s named for her father’s favorite player—meets a former pitcher (Justin Timberlake) trying to carve out a post-playing niche for himself in baseball after washing out early. Guess what happens between them.

Except for an odd bit of backstory involving a horse, there’s really nothing unpredictable in Trouble with the Curve, either dramatically or visually—the plot’s resolution has, almost, a fairy-tale inevitability. The director is Eastwood’s longtime producer and assistant director Robert Lorenz, making his feature debut, but the style is very much the same as Eastwood’s—straightforward, unadorned narrative, unfolded at a leisurely pace. The dialogue, by Randy Brown, is likewise functional.

The good news is that the picture is still enjoyable and relaxing, thanks to the acting. Eastwood’s Do Not Go Gentle act seems effortless. His timing and his iconic, narrow-eyed expression make his spitting anger funny, and he has a convincing rapport with Adams and Timberlake, and especially with John Goodman, excellent as his boss and defender.

The supporting cast is full of old pros—Ed Lauter, Bob Gunton, Jack Gilpin, George Wyner, Raymond Anthony Thomas and even Chelcie Ross, who’s become a sort of sports-movie good luck charm, having appeared in Major League, Hoosiers and Rudy. These guys reinforce the movie’s point that while getting old is a drag, it doesn’t necessarily make you useless.

I must warn you, from here on I’m going to unload all the baseball metaphors I want. So: unlike the elegant, quietly intriguing Moneyball, released around this time last year, Trouble with the Curve isn’t a grand slam, or even a homer. Eastwood and company play small ball; they methodically get on, get over, get home. And at the end of nine, Clint puts another one in his lengthy win column.