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Time - Man of the Year
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1992-09-10
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REVIEWS, Page 66CINEMAAll Appetite
By RICHARD SCHICKEL
TITLE: The Babe
DIRECTOR: Arthur Hiller
WRITER: John Fusco
THE BOTTOM LINE: An honestly unheroic view of a hero, with
a grand-slam performance by John Goodman
On his last day in baseball, after his glory had faded and
the princely New York Yankees had fobbed him off on the lowly
Boston Braves, Babe Ruth pulled himself together and hit three
home runs against the Pittsburgh Pirates. Arthur Hiller and
John Fusco must have been tempted to turn that into a wildly
exultant moment, like the conclusion of The Natural -- music
soaring, fireworks exploding, the crowd in hysterics. But no,
it's just an away game on a flatly lighted September afternoon
at the end of a nowhere season. The people who made The Babe
seem to understand F. Scott Fitzgerald's remark about there
being no second acts in American life. They have the honesty to
let their movie peter out just as Ruth's career did -- in anger,
hurt and stupefaction.
Their conclusion is entirely in keeping with the
remarkable -- and in its way quite daring -- temper of the rest
of their movie, which is both antiheroic and antiepic, and thus
a departure from the generally undistinguished tradition of the
sports biopic. It may be a departure from the expectations of
modern moviegoers too. For one thing, they prefer more relevant
subjects than old-time baseball heroes, however legendary. For
another, they like their true stories to be slathered over with
false sentiment -- the human spirit triumphant in unlikely but
inspirational ways.
It may just be, however, that they will turn out to see
the always likable John Goodman and come away enthralled by a
marvelous acting achievement. Goodman is every inch the arrested
adolescent -- all appetite and no regrets until they are too
late -- that the Babe was. To maintain sympathy for a figure who
never "develops" in the customary dramatic sense (let alone
morally or intellectually), he nicely balances force-of-nature
rambunctiousness and a shadowed befuddlement about the
mysterious requirements of civilized behavior. His Ruth is
vigorous and vulgar but somehow not boorish, poignantly
sweet-spirited at times but never self-sentimentalizing.
Ruth's parents abandoned him to a Roman Catholic
industrial school specializing in "incorrigible" boys when he
was an oversize, undereducated kid, and he went right from it
into baseball. In other words, he was adapted only to heavily
masculine, institutional worlds, and then solely as show-off,
big spender and clown. His first marriage, to a homebody (played
here with spunky charm by Trini Alvarado), was a disaster; the
only family that counted with him was the team and the raffish
demimonde it inhabited off the field. Ruth fared better the
second time around. Claire Ruth (Kelly McGillis, in a brave,
hard-nosed performance), a sometime show girl, had nothing
against partying, but she was tough, shrewd and -- probably the
only kind of woman Ruth could understand -- roughly
affectionate, a little bit like one of the guys. In any case,
you can't characterize their relationship as either tender or
traditionally romantic.
But it does ring true. Just as, aside from some poorly
faked newsreel sequences and some not completely persuasive
baseball playing, The Babe rings true -- that is, sad and a
little tawdry.