Trouble with Clint Eastwood

Anyone who happened to see Clint Eastwood haranguing an empty chair during the Republican Convention earlier this year and referring to it as “Mr. President” might have wondered about his eyesight — and his mental health. Therefore it’s easy to buy Eastwood playing an aging baseball talent scout with macular degeneration in Trouble with the Curve.

It’s easy, too, because the first 20 minutes seem like total déjà vu. You’ve seen this setup before in Gran Torino: Eastwood as a grouchy old curmudgeon who visits his wife’s grave and has a distant relationship with his kid and lives in practically the same nondescript small house that he does in that earlier movie.

Yet, as much as I initially found Trouble with the Curve corny and clichéd, hang with it a bit and it grows on you. There’s a certain perennial charm about baseball stories, even baseball stories that are as old as the game itself. This one, if you had to pitch it, would be “Moneyball meets Million Dollar Baby.” But nobody dies or wins the pennant.

Clint is Gus Lobel, a gifted old-school talent scout in an age of high-stakes spreadsheet baseball, where hotshots use computer programs to pick the next pro stars. Matthew Lillard (looking alarmingly Muppet-like these days) is one of those annoying hotshots. Gus is sent to North Carolina to assess a college player and see if he should be signed by the Atlanta Braves; if he blows it, Gus’ll be put out to pasture — a prospect that Lillard relishes. But Gus can barely navigate his own living room without tripping over the coffee table.

Back in the game: Clint Eastwood comes out of semi-retirement to play — you guessed it — a grumpy old coot.

Clint doesn’t talk to a chair in this movie, but he does sing to his wife’s tombstone, and talks to his penis at one point (coaxing it to stream freely in a public urinal). Chalk it up to Clint’s idiosyncratic charm.

Enter Mickey (Amy Adams), his estranged daughter whom Gus used to drag along on the road during his talent scouting heyday (the mother died when she was six). Then he left her to live with an uncle and barely took an interest in her life. Now she’s a fast-track lawyer and set to make partner in the Atlanta firm when — wouldn’t you know it? — Gus’s pal Pete (John Goodman) asks her to tag along with her dad in North Carolina, to see that he doesn’t bump into things.

Of course this road trip messes with her crucial focus time on an “important client” and ensures that her pending partnership will be put in jeopardy; and of course it means that Mickey and Gus will spar and argue and never get into what caused him to abandon her until very near the end of the movie. This stuff is all as familiar as a Fenway Park frank.

So it’s up to the chemistry of the stars to pull it off. Eastwood, as grizzled as grizzle can be, came out of retirement to rehash a character he’s been playing for decades; yet the audience at the preview I attended reacted to his every growl and squint as though he was the funniest screen curmudgeon since that old guy in Up. Possibly, Eastwood reminds them of their grandfather.

It’s his chemistry with Adams — and her effortless chemistry with Justin Timberlake (playing Flannagan, a washed-up player and would-be talent scout) — that makes Trouble with the Curve a solid double, if nowhere near a homerun.

Once Gus and Mickey are in North Carolina, they meet up with Flannagan, a former pitching prospect that Gus scouted long ago; since throwing out his arm, he’s seeking a job in broadcasting for the Boston Red Sox — but only if he, too, can prove his scouting acumen by assessing the hot college hitter from the minors.

Of course, the hot college hitter is a money-obsessed ass who only cares about getting signed and scoring groupies; he has a fatal hitting flaw that it takes a grizzled veteran, half-blind or not, to spot.

Trouble with the Curve brims with old-fashioned values. This is actually its strength. First of all, there’s baseball. What could be more traditional than that? Season after season, teams send scouts to find who’s got something special to bring to the game; it’s one of the reasons baseball has perennial appeal. Then there’s very little hanky-panky. Hell, even a skinny-dipping scene with Amy Adams — who is no stranger to playing “earthy” characters — has her keeping a T-shirt on over her bra. After all, you don’t want to mess with an “R” rating in a baseball movie. Eastwood is his familiar gruff, fossilized character, set in his ways, which of course are better than the new ways; he’s a guy who believes in getting out of the office and seeing the talent on the field rather than staring at a laptop. So it’s anti-Moneyball in that way.

Gus is, of course, metaphorically blind as well as physically sight-impaired (see: Movie Metaphors 101). Because he appreciates family values, he’s willing to pay to fly a young player’s parents up to visit their son and help him get out of a hitting slump; yet he can’t make the same connection with his own daughter. Because he has — yes, you guessed it — an emotional blind spot.

The script is so pat, it would have you believe that Adams finds a kid good enough to play in the pros practicing in the parking lot of the motel she's staying at, and that the Braves instantly sign him.

Yet Trouble with the Curve does chuck a few curveballs into the traditional values formula, something that would probably knock Mitt Romney for a loop. The immigrants (Mexican, maybe; or Dominican) who run the motel are hardworking, decent and honest, while the hot college hitter is fat, lazy and white. And since Mickey is such a tomboy — capable of firing off a string of baseball stats and hustling bar creeps at billiards — it’s up to Flannagan’s character to play the chick: he’s all Dr. Phil sensitive, reversing the roles as he tries to get Mickey to loosen up.

Again, it’s not really reinventing the wheel here. Baseball movies, like baseball comeback plots, come and go with the seasons. Trouble with the Curve, though loaded with schmaltz and lacking dramatic gravitas, makes up for it with quiet charm. Kind of like the game itself.