After this year’s Super Bowl, people in these parts are finding it easier to suspend their disbelief, at least when it comes to sports. Maybe that’s why I was a sucker for the feel-good, finely crafted, and generally honest hooey of The Rookie. The value of teamwork, of belief, of persevering when no one else has faith — if it worked for real on the gridiron, why not on the big screen, too? Ignore the obvious manipulation, the predictable plot points, and the French horns on the soundtrack and this corny tale about making dreams come true seems as if it could be a true story.
Which in fact it is. In 1999, Jim Morris, a 36-year-old Texas high-school chemistry teacher and coach, tried out for the Tampa Bay Devil Rays and made it to the show. He lasted two seasons. As he went from common man to demi-god, however briefly, his career embodied many of the myths that have make baseball such a vital part of America’s consciousness.
No doubt that’s what screenwriter Mike Rich had in mind when he concocted this film’s opening framing device, a wispy fable of oil rigs, nuns, a miraculous saint, and 1920s baseball all festooned with yellow rose petals. At once mawkish, pointless, and far-fetched, it’s a reminder of the grandiosity that marred Rich’s previous film, Finding Forrester, and it calls to mind pompous baseball movies from The Natural to For Love of the Game. Fortunately, The Rookie soon climbs off this pedestal and gets down to the dust and detail of the real world from which it springs, the dull, endearing routines of middle-class America and the slow death of compromising one’s dreams to social conformity and the expectations of others.
That’s the world where we first meet young Jim Morris, the son of a mean-spirited martinet Navy lifer (Brian Cox). Despite his dad’s disdain and his family’s peripatetic life, Jim persists in his drive to become a big-leaguer, donning different Little League uniforms as they bounce from one Navy base to the next before settling down in the flyblown shabbiness of Big Lake, Texas.
A jump cut later, Jim (Dennis Quaid) is middle-aged and with a family of his own, trying to teach his half-hearted baseball team (10 players and nine gloves) the importance of not quitting. Tough to do when he’s quit himself; he had a shot in the minor leagues years earlier and blew out his arm. Now he just throws the ball against the backstop late at night, a Sisyphean exercise that calms him down before he returns home to his kids and his hard-headed wife, Lorri (Rachel Griffiths).
This hypocrisy doesn’t escape the kids on the team, however, and they force him to make a deal: if they win the district championship, he has to give the big leagues another try. So what follows is a double-tiered Rocky scenario, the Big Lake High School Owls winning against all odds, and then their superannuated coach posting a 98 mph fastball on a big-league scout’s radar gun. Throw in a little G-rated Bull Durham as Morris struggles through the carnival indignities of the minor leagues and The Rookie — along with its rookie director, John Lee Hancock — seems hardly new at the game of Hollywood formulization.
No doubt the film has cut a few factual corners and resorted to some comfortable clichés in ordering the complexities, the terrors, and the joys of life into entertainment for general audiences. But unlike Oscar winner A Beautiful Mind, this one still respects the truth. That’s evident in the details, the dialogue, and the performances, from the drab but eccentric furnishings of the Morris’s hardscrabble homestead to the homely and utterly genuine faces of the kids he coaches. It can be seen in Quaid’s battered baseball mitt of a face and in the honest anguish his Morris shows when he confronts the emptiness of his dream denied, and the even greater horror he discovers when he ponders that dream’s potential fulfillment. It can be heard in the utter ambivalence with which Morris repeats the bad advice of three generations when he explains his reasons for giving up, and in the solicitous triumph with which he tells his son over the phone what color devil rays are and whether they are good to eat.
More important, The Rookie shows respect for the truth and for its audience by what it chooses not to show. Griffiths’s Lorri, for example, looks as if she might be the goat for her husband’s diminished expectations ("I was glad when you quit"), but her role proves much more ambiguous and sympathetic. Brian Cox’s hard-assed Jim Sr. — a nuanced, tragic, unforgiving performance — may walk off with the game ball, but don’t expect any late-inning heroics. In short, like a New England sports fan, The Rookie knows what losing — real life, in other words — is all about. Which makes the winning, short-lived and illusory though it might be, all the sweeter.
