The Natural

The Natural is the most mythically beautiful sports film ever made — a movie that transforms baseball into Arthurian legend, with Robert Redford's Roy Hobbs as a knight errant whose bat, Wonderboy, is carved from a tree struck by lightning. Barry Levinson filmed baseball as if it were sacred, and cinematographer Caleb Deschanel shot every frame with the golden light of a renaissance painting.

Redford's Hobbs is a middle-aged rookie who appears from nowhere to lead the hapless New York Knights to a pennant race. His backstory — a youthful prodigy shot by a mysterious woman, spending sixteen years in obscurity before returning — gives the character the weight of myth. Redford plays Hobbs as a man carrying a secret sorrow, and his quiet dignity makes the character more compelling than any monologue could.

The final at-bat — Hobbs, bleeding through his jersey, facing the lights with Wonderboy shattered, swinging a new bat fashioned by the batboy — is the single most cinematic moment in sports history. The ball rising into the stadium lights, the sparks cascading like fireworks, Randy Newman's score soaring — it is not realistic. It is mythic. And that is the point. The Natural argues that baseball is America's mythology, and mythology does not need to be realistic. It needs to be true in its bones. This film is true in its bones.