Dir:
Craig Gillespie
With: Jon Hamm, Lake Bell, Aasif Mandvi
Runtime: 124 minutes
AT one point in this tale of sporting endeavour, characters are seen watching 1942's The Pride of the Yankees. The featured scene is the one where Gary Cooper, playing baseball legend Lou Gehrig, is declaring himself the luckiest man on the face of the Earth, even though he is dying. As the camera pans from the TV screen to the tear-stained faces of DVD watchers in modern LA, we see the film has worked its melancholy magic again.
Million Dollar Arm is not a six hankie number like The Pride of the Yankees, but that is not to detract from its considerable charm. Just as Sam Wood's 1942 biopic, being a film about a good man in a world gone to the bad, was of its wartime day, so Craig Gillespie's drama is in step with modern sporting times. Its central hero, played by Mad Men's Jon Hamm, is an agent for heaven's sake, and the tale, based on a true story, takes place across continents and involves big money stakes, media hoopla, and the transfer of talent from the developing world to the West. While this could have led to a cynical movie, Million Dollar Arm turns out to have a heart almost as big as the one that beats in The Pride of the Yankees. Yes, it teeters dangerously close to schmaltz at times, but the sure hand of its director (who helmed the loveably left field Lars and the Real Girl) and writer Tom McCarthy (Up, The Visitor) pull it back just in time. If all that, plus Hamm ripping the bones out of his first lead in a major movie is not enough to make this your choice of viewing this weekend, there is also a joyously raucous soundtrack from AR Rahman of Slumdog Millionaire fame.
The film opens with agent JB Bernstein (Hamm) hustling to find clients after leaving a big agency. In this he is having about as much success as Jerry Maguire. His partner Aash (Aasif Mandvi) keeps telling him to get into cricket, but JB, taking what might be called a Scots attitude to the ball and wicket game, reckons cricket is the kind of sport that might have been created in an asylum.
Nevertheless, while channel surfing one night, JB comes across oor ain Susan Boyle, no less, delivering her show-stopping I Dreamed a Dream on Britain's Got Talent. A couple of channels later, the cricket is on. On goes a lightbulb: why not stage a talent competition in India, built around bowling, bring the winners to America to be trained in baseball, and have them try out for a major league team? It's a wizard wheeze, the art of being an agent in action, and JB thinks he is just the man to pull it off.
As with Don Draper, Hamm is able to take what could have been a flat, familiar character and give him plenty of intriguing angles. His JB is a charmer, a hustler, a man content to exist on the surface of life, slipping and out of relationships with ease. The last thing he wants is any real responsibility to tie him down.
Gillespie spends half the film in India, soaking up its landscape, majesty and chaos. In the main we get to know the place through the two young sportsmen JB finds, Rinku and Dinesh (Suraj Sharma, Life of Pi, and Madhur Mittal, Slumdog Millionaire), and the various fixers he employs. Together with ferociously grumpy talent scout Ray (Alan Arkin) and JB's doctor neighbour Brenda (the always terrific Lake Bell), a strange little family is being formed, one that will be tested by the move to LA and the try outs.
Though Hamm is the big name draw here, Gillespie gives everyone a shot with the bat, the two youngsters especially, and they rise to the occasion. With plenty of feeling, not too much in the way of baseball chat to bore a non-American audience, and some nicely judged humour, Gillespie's film proves a home run of a sports movie.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article