"Million Dollar Arm" at Durham Library Thursday

Movie Notes by Don Bourret

Million Dollar Arm is a pleasant enough if predictable sports/underdog movie from Disney in the tradition of Rocky (boxing), Hoosiers (basketball) and Miracle On Ice (hockey). This one has to do with baseball and is based on a true story.

In 2007 sports agent J.B. Bernstein (Mad Men’s Jon Hamm) with a failing business and desperate for new talent stages a baseball competition in India to find a Cricket player who could be trained to be an outstanding fastball pitcher, learn the game in an accelerated schedule and be recruited by a major league team in the U.S. He parlays this outrageous scheme into a 10-week reality show called Million Dollar Arm, and it attracts major attention as well as financing both at home and in India.

He finds two young men, Rinku and Dinesh, and lures them away to L.A. without appreciating or caring for the huge emotional and geographical upheaval they have to endure. Coming from small villages awash in loving kindness, they are overwhelmed by the sterility and frantic pace of their new life and desperate for even the smallest support from Bernstein, whom they have come to regard as a father figure.

Hamm is excellent in the central role, but his character is so unpleasant, so self-absorbed and focused on the money and the “deal” for so much of the movie that it’s very hard to root for him even as you feel his desperation. You do root, however, for Rinku (Suraj Sharma) and Dinesh (Madhur Mittal) as you share their fears and pain, but also their joy in new discoveries (pizza, big-screen TVs, Hollywood parties, large rooms with AC, etc.) Sharma will be familiar to some as the star of Life Of Pi, and Mittal was a principal in 2008’s Oscar winner Slumdog Millionaire.

The sequences in India are breathtaking, beautifully photographed and capturing all its color and loveliness as well as its congestion and squalor. As Bernstein comments on a phone call, all that’s missing are the smells.

The film is superficial, a bit preachy, and Bernstein’s 11th-hour turnabout and willingness to pass up the money he has sought all through the film is a little hard to swallow. But as I said at the start, the film is pleasant and the characters are most likeable, even Bernstein at the end. This is not a spoiler; it’s Disney. The film works also because it has a moral at its core, that compassion and empathy are more powerful motivation tools than cracking a whip. We all know that, right?