Rêve de champion

****

Starring: Dennis Quaid, Rachel Griffiths, and Angus T. Jones.

A science teacher in his late thirties decides to follow his dream...playing professional baseball. The team that he coaches makes a bet that if they win the championship, then he must try out for pro baseball. Well guess what happens? Yep, you guessed it. I can't exactly tell you the rest, but you'll love it.

The film has a lot of heart that keeps this movie going and going. Quaid portrays a wonderful performance as Jimmy Morris. Everyone else is perfect, and his is definitely on the top 10 of 2002. It's Oscar material all the way and deserves whatever it gets.

What's also good about this is that it can be a great movie with no bad language or anything. That's a sign of great writing.

Highly recommended to everyone, but very highly recommended to families.

My favorite films are those which are based on an interesting true story, and are well made. "The Rookie" fits that bill, and I rate it very highly. At first glance it appears to be about getting to play baseball. In fact, it is about making your dreams come true, and the power of friendship. Baseball just happens to be the subject matter. The first one-hour movie is about a 10-member high school team in West Texas that barely manages to win one game each year. It is about their coach inspiring them to become the district champs and go to the state tournament in 1999.

The second one-hour movie comes about from a "deal" the kids made with the coach. "If we win district, then you have to go to a tryout with a professional baseball team." They do, so he does. And to his and everyone else's surprise, his 85-mph fastball as a 20-year-old has become a 98-mph one as a 35-year-old. The films hints that it might have been divine intervention, a prayer to St Rita, the patron of the impossible. Might have been!!

Dennis Quaid is a bit older than 35, but he does a good job and is believable as science teacher, coach, and finally a surprised big-league pitcher in Arlington, Tx stadium, where he strikes out his very first big-league batter. The real Jim played two seasons, not particularly distinguished, but that point is way secondary. The journey, and the way he made it, with support from family and his baseball kids is what this film is all about.

The DVD is very nice, with a great picture and decent use of the 5.1 Dolby surround sound. Extras include footage of the real Jim, some original footage of his playing days, and his narration and re-enactment of his first trip to a big-league mound. Great stuff! Plus a few, moderately interesting deleted scenes explained by the director.

This was one of the best bio-pics I have seen in years. Dennis Quaid is perfect as Jim Morris, a man who finally gets a shot at his lifelong dream-pitching in the big leagues. He is a high school science teacher/baseball coach whose players make a bet with him:if they win district, he tries out for the majors. You can probably guess what happens next. I found this story made even more powerful by the fact that it was based on a true story.

*** out of ****

Usually I review a movie just after I've seen it, but the last time I saw this one was a full 2 weeks ago. Yet it still sticks in my mind and heart.

Baseball movies are inspirational by nature and seem to have all kinds of application to life (for example, my review of Field of Dreams). Jimmy Morris challenges the losing baseball team he's coaching to not give up on their dreams and has the challenge thrown right back at him. This wouldn't make for such drama if the majority of the movie up to that point hadn't been to show how Jimmy's own dream had been systematically dismantled. Such movies anyone can write, but when I found out it was a true story, it put the movie in a higher bracket altogether.

The conflict between Jimmy and his father is played very well by both Quaid and Cox. At one point or another, you can just feel coldness of the walls built up between them. They're reaching out (Hunter's baseball glove, Jimmy's asking advice), but can they ever connect?

While some might balk (sorry) at the presence of Hunter, Jimmy's son, I think the kid adds a lot to the film. Baseball is all about kids, anyway. And it's good to see a son who looks up to and believes in his dad. That phase is over far too soon for most fathers to enjoy it enough. I think the dream is as much Hunter's as it is his father's.

The theme of the Rookie is "never give up on your dreams." That's laudable. But the affirmation of the importance of families, even through broken relationships, as well as a clean script, makes this one that families can buy to watch every now and then. Disney surprised me with this believable, down-to-earth tale. I'm definitely picking this one up on DVD.

When women feel the need for a `good cry' at the movies, they usually seek out some tragic tale of unrequited love to do the trick. When men feel the same need, they turn to a film about baseball. And what could be more guaranteed to convert a grown man into a shamelessly blubbering fool than a true-life account of a middle-aged baseball fanatic who gets to fulfill his lifelong dream of playing in the major leagues? How many men can fail to identify with that? Indeed, most men may not want to admit this, but the baseball movie genre has, in many ways, become the male equivalent of that category of film known, derisively by many men, as the `chick flick,' for they both serve roughly the same purpose. Apparently, even we stoic males have the need to clear out the tear ducts every now and then - for purely medical reasons of course.

Because baseball has long enjoyed the reputation of being `America's National Pastime,' moviemakers have often treated it less as a sport than as an iconic institution. From `Pride of the Yankees' to `Brian's Song' to `Bang the Drum Slowly' to `The Natural' to `Field of Dreams,' movies about baseball have been so concerned with all the mythic implications of the sport that they have rarely managed to convey the sense of carefree fun that comes along with it (`Bull Durham' has been one of the few obvious exceptions to this rule). The tone in these films is sometimes so sentimental and so reverential that one begins to view baseball more as a type of pseudo religion - with the stadium functioning as a sort of temple where people gather to participate in a communal spiritual experience - than as a form of entertainment.

`The Rookie' certainly falls into this category, yet the film itself has such an air of comforting familiarity about it that it manages to override much of the conventionality of the storyline. Although we always know where the movie is headed, the easy assuredness with which it charts its course keeps us interested and absorbed for most of the duration. The majority of the credit goes to Dennis Quaid who, as Jim Morris, the high-school-teacher-turned-big-league-ballplayer, does a first rate job portraying a man torn between responsibility to his family and this golden, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity of realizing a childhood dream. Quaid underplays the role so nicely that we never doubt for a moment the authenticity of all we are seeing on screen. The screenplay by Mike Rich, though filled with overly familiar scenes and characters, nevertheless manages to avoid many of the potential lapses into overwrought melodrama that could conceivably have robbed it of much of its credibility (the dark hints early on in the film as to Morris' problematic physical condition happily never come to fruition). Director John Lee Hancock establishes an almost elegiac tone, pacing the film in such a way as to match the unhectic lifestyle of both Morris and the small Texas town in which he lives.

`The Rookie,' like Disney's previous sports opus `Remember the Titans,' eschews violence, sexuality and bad language completely, thereby garnering the film a `G' rating and making it first class entertainment for the entire family. There may be nothing much new in it for adults, but `The Rookie' has the skill to make what was old seem somehow new again. Not unlike what happens to the hero himself in fact.