A League of Their Own

Rating:
Summary: THE AIR WENT OUT OF THE BALLOON
Review: I wanted to really like A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN. A refreshingly uplifting tale of professional women baseball players, Penny Marshall kept the film moving and interesting, until...that copout of an ending. Rooting for the team the whole movie, and then kaboom....they don't win!!! I found Geena Davis and Lori Petty's characters to be the epitome of self-effacing, selfish whiny losers. Davis allows Petty to blame her for all the things that have gone wrong in her life; the whiny little sister who is always in the shadow of her more accomplished bigger sister wore thin, particularly since Petty was so self-centered in it. Then take Davis...she selfishly leaves the team at the World Series, then comes back in game 7 and expects to play, despite the fact that stand in Alice has played the first six games. And then, in the film's climactic moment, she "drops" the ball, all to allow her whiny sister a chance to be "the star" of the moment. And then afterwards, the two act like they are the best of friends in a maudlin huggy poo scene. I liked 3/4 of this movie, but the ending was a soporific attempt to pull "a lifelike unpredictable ending," but was it fair to the team to allow this sibling rivalry to come out in favor of the whiny younger brat? Boo hiss!!!!

Rating:
Summary: Stylish, warm and fun to watch
Review: This movie is about ten times better than it has any right to be considering how sappy director Penny Marshall could have been tempted to make it, and how phony is the actual baseball played by the young women. (More on this below.)

What makes it work are fine performances by Geena Davis as catcher Dottie Hinson, "the best player in the league," and Lori Petty as her younger sister, Kit Keller. Geena Davis absolutely looks the part with her cool confidence and stately figure while Lori Petty is scrappy and believable as the little sister whose puck and determination set the stage for a sister-rivalry climax at the end.

Jon Lovitz as Ernie Capadino, the baseball talent scout, is a crackup as he delivers just about all the best one liners. (Example: he's watching Dottie and Kit milk the cows and asks, "Doesn't that hurt them?" Geena shrugs for the city slicker, "They don't seem to mind." Ernie thinks about it and then says, "Well, it would bruise the heck out of me," which was doubly funny since he has his anatomy confused.) But the guy who really holds the whole thing together is Tom Hanks as one-time home run king Jimmy Dugan, who is now the Rockford Peaches' alcoholic manager. I have seen Tom Hanks in a number of films, but I don't think he was ever any better than he is here. His transformation from a crude, uncaring drunk to the team's hard-nosed but soft-hearted leader is very well and believably done. And Hanks was never more charming and seldom funnier.

Just as good as the work of the fine cast is Marshall's clear, old-fashioned direction. In many ways this film is a throwback to an earlier time when films set out to warm the hearts of the audience and uplift their spirits. Sure, there is evil in the world and you can't win them all, but you can try, is what this film makes us feel, and if you do, something good will happen. There is of course a somewhat self-conscious retrospective look at the sorry political and social state of women sixty years ago, but Marshall does not wallow in the politics. Instead she emphasizes a fun-to-watch tale with real human characters. The unpredictable, but believable ending was very agreeable.

Okay now to some of the problems with the "baseball." Notice that we first see Kit as a softball pitcher. How she made the transition from throwing underhanded to being one of the best overhand hardball throwers in the league in just a few months is...well, doubtful. And the outfits they wore! Ever try to slide into second trying to break up the double play without sliding pads or even jersey pants? I don't think so. The girls were bare-legged. To Marshall's credit she does show one girl with a huge strawberry bruise on her thigh. Furthermore for those viewers who have actually played baseball, the way many of the young women threw and caught the ball was again, shall we say, doubtful. Marshall employed as extras some young ladies who could actually play a little and we see some shots of their style and grace, but the only star who could even pretend to play at that level would be Rosie O'Donnell. Madonna has some athletic ability, but to imagine her patrolling center field and hauling down long drives strains credibility.

Okay, so what? If we put Tom Hanks at bat against even the most mediocre of Class A pitchers, it would be obvious that he is no home run king. In fact, I think Penny Marshall did a great job of creating and maintaining the illusion of Big League skills for the players so that we were not distracted from the story itself. Skillful editing helped.

By the way, if they gave Academy Awards for a performance in a role short of a supporting role but longer than a cameo (and maybe they should), Megan Cavanagh would have won it for her touching impersonation of Marla Hooch, a painfully shy and vulnerable, less than pretty girl from the farm who finds herself as a baseball player in the city as she steals some guy's heart with an unselfconscious, boozy, off-key torch song. I also loved the scene where she is rocketing line drives off the walls and through the windows of the high school gymnasium.

Note the appearance of David L. Lander as the radio play-by-play guy. He's best known as the wacky/creepy "Squiggy" Squiggman from the old Laverne and Shirley TV sit-com. Here he plays it mostly straight but does get to wear his hat with the bill up as Leo Gorcey did in the East Side Kids (AKA The Bowery Boys) movies from the early forties.

Bottom line here: Uplifting, fun, and even worth seeing again.