Trouble with the Curve (Robert Lorenz, 2012): USA

Reviewed by Lauren Sousa. Viewed at Metropolitan Camino Real

It is easy to tell the purpose of some films. Some were created to help the audience escape their painful lives. Some have a message for the world. Others, created only for profit. It’s difficult, though, to tell the exact intent of first-time director Robert Lorenz’s Trouble with the Curve. The film is serviceable entertainment, but not much else.

With a total of four intertwined plots and a running time of 111 minutes, there should have been plenty of time to develop each plot, but the film suffers from a bloated script by Randy Brown. Many scenes have multiple parts and, thanks to several phone calls by various characters, settings. Overall, it seems that a lot of time is wasted by these maneuvers, but it’s enjoyably wasted. A typical scene spends a minute or so exploring a limp setup before the plot begins.

The plot itself is relatively simple: Gus (Clint Eastwood), an baseball scout, is aging, so, at his boss (John Goodman)’s request, his daughter Mickey (Amy Adams) takes time off from her rapidly advancing career as some sort of high-powered lawyer on the verge of making partner. This main plot is probably intended to contrast Mickey’s drive to get ahead with Gus’s stubborn reliance on the good, old-fashioned way, but as the film progresses, it becomes clear that they are much more similar than different: both want to be good at what they do at the expense of everything else. While his rejection of computers is rendering him obsolete, her commitment to her job, including bringing along a key case on vacation, is supposed to fire her up, but it doesn’t. Although predictable, this storyline is emotionally satisfying, helped by the good chemistry between Adams and Eastwood. They are, in fact, so good at liking each other that, even when required, they cannot hate each other. Their second storyline, thankfully relegated below the first, is supposed to show that somewhere along the way, their relationship was damaged, but it falls flat, seeming too quickly resolved to have actually ever mattered; entirely unnecessary, it feels like filler. Intended to inject much-needed drama is a plot involving “trouble with the curve” that isn’t very dramatic. The perfunctory love story is acceptably effective though it receives almost no screen time. Of course, it ends happily and without ambivalence.

There isn’t any baseball in the mix: although it is considered a “sports drama,” it’s really just a straight drama with no need for baseball knowledge: in one scene, intended to be dramatic, a player gets out after only one strike, perhaps emblematic for the type of drama this film often employs: flatly unnecessary and blatantly false, it fails to tug heartstrings in the way that it might be trying to do so.  The actors never really give the film the kind of tension it would need to gain realism; the script is just good enough that it seems possible, but the casting choices are actually very good, so perhaps it simply isn’t.

The film has two different photographic filters, the first a cool, light grey, used for every scene remotely involving business, and the second, a slight warm brown tinge for everything else. Though not terribly distracting, the distinction seems a bit unnecessary when considering how often the two mix.

The use of filters is not the only trend to which Trouble with the Curve has succumbed. It also features the shaky, “documentary-style” camerawork ubiquitous to contemporary films. Although the effect is intended to connote realism, submerging the viewer further into the film, it really does the opposite. By shaking the image, it becomes clear that we are, in fact, watching a film projected on a screen: real life doesn’t twitch. Of course, the complaint is not exclusive to this film, but distracting nonetheless.

The most disappointing frame of the whole film, though, comes right at the end, with no time left to redeem itself. Close to a perfectly photographic finish, a car drives by in the background, ruining the finish.

Overall, Trouble with the Curve is an enjoyable though forgettable film, not terribly original, written and directed without much distinctive style, in which the actors do well with what they are given, which isn’t much.