A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1992 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule review: Move over, Rosie the Riveter: this film celebrates Betty the Baseball Player. Penny Marshall tells the story of the women's baseball league founded during World War II. The script is a little cliched and predictable, but Marshall, as usual, tells an engrossing story. Rating: +1 (-4 to +4).
At one point in A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN, Dottie Hinson (played by Geena Davis) observes that playing baseball is hard. Veteran ballplayer Jimmy Dugan (played by Tom Hanks) tells her sagely, "If it wasn't hard, everyone would do it. The hard makes it great." I think that must play better to baseball fans than it does to me. Having as I do virtually zero interest in the game itself, I would not play no matter how easy it was for me. Nor do I believe that the game is great or that its hardness makes it great. The presence of baseball will not make a film very good in itself. For a baseball film actually to be good it has to rely not on good baseball content or the belief that playing baseball is somehow a noble profession. That is why I like THE NATURAL and FIELD OF DREAMS, but THE PRIDE OF THE YANKEES leaves me cold. I think that A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN really requires of the viewer a belief that there was something noble in women playing baseball and keeping the sport alive while most of the men players were fighting in World War II. For me that is a difficult leap of faith to make and you can weight this review accordingly.
A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN is, I suspect, almost pure fiction vaguely inspired by real events as was director Penny Marshall's previous film, AWAKENINGS. Undoubtedly some of the background detail is accurate, but most of the drama is probably made up of the whole cloth. The story tells how Hinson and her sister Kit Keller (played by Lori Petty) are recruited by a hilariously rude and obnoxious scout (played by Jon Lovitz). Sixty-four women are chosen to field the four teams of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. Kit is more anxious to play than is her older sister, but Dottie is a natural. Not that anyone seems to care. Their alcoholic team manager, Dugan, introduces himself to his team by shuffling drunkenly to the locker room urinal, using it, and shuffling back out. During the games, he shows his commitment to the team by sleeping, scratching his crotch, or practicing what appears to be a regimen of losing ten pounds a week by spitting. Hanks takes to this role as if his view of baseball players mirrors my own. League President Ira Lowenstein (played by David Strathairn) at first is anxious only to be certain that the skirts on the uniforms are short enough to attract audience interest. The news media seems even less interested, editorializing against the "masculinization of women" and then making amused and patronizing newsreels about the women's league.
The script is by Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel and is something of a comedown for the team, who wrote PARENTHOOD and CITY SLICKERS. Much in the plot is incredibly predictable and overly cliched. A word that is overused to describe a film of this sort is "manipulative." Actually, a film should be manipulative, and Ganz and Mandel have done it well in the past. Here it is often done well, but other times done too obviously. The last ten minutes of the film are maudlin and drag. They could and should have been cut to two minutes. The script comes perilously close to making fun of the awkward, plain, and shy Marla (played by Megan Cavanaugh). While some of the male characters redeem themselves later in the film, they almost universally are insensitive jerks when we first meet them.
That brings me to the issue of hypocrisy in this superficially feminist film. The order of billing is Hanks, Davis, Madonna (as a stereotypical loose woman), and Petty. Based on contribution, the order should have been Davis, Petty, Hanks, and Madonna. Top billing for Hanks is absurd; he just did not do more than Davis or Petty. The locker room scenes are G-ratable in the first half of the film, then suddenly turn "peek-a-boo" in the second half of the film.
The score by Hans Zimmer deserves some credit, occasionally having some of the mythic feel of Randy Newman's score for THE NATURAL. However, it mixes in rock, which seems out of place in a film mostly about the 1940s. I would like to call some attention to David Strathairn as Lowenstein. He plays quiet and usually likable characters of integrity. He played a policeman sympathetic to the strikers in MATEWAN and a commander very worried for the safety of his men in MEMPHIS BELLE. He reminds me a lot of a latter-day Henry Fonda. I have never seen him in a bad film, which indicates either that he is intelligent enough to select only better scripts or that his acting has qualities that appeal only to better filmmakers.
One final nice touch: the script calls for us to see most of the main characters as they look almost fifty years later. Normally this would be done with a makeup effect. These makeup effects are rarely done believably and the results are almost always at least suspect. Marshall went to the effort of finding look-alike actors of approximately correct ages, then had the younger actors dub the voices. The effect is reasonably convincing.
Considerable money and effort was lavished on this production, but problems in the script diminish the effort to a +1 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Mark R. Leeper
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