Even if you haven’t seen that many sports movies you probably have a good sense of what to expect going in to one. There will be rousing highs. There will be lows along the way that attempt to trick you into thinking that victory might not be achieved in the end. A romantic subplot is a must, as are some cool action shots of the game and a main character with past demons or incredible odds stacked against him or her. The trajectory is usually the same, the details somewhat rearranged, and sadly they can’t all be Rocky. The based on a true story Million Dollar Arm is not much of an exception. It attempts no serious wheel reinventions. That’s okay. Comfort food is an indulgence, not a damnable offense. This one actually does have some good things going for it, but it makes the athletes secondary to the business and still winds up being a mostly routine, pleasant sports picture with no bite.
Jon Hamm plays Jamie Bernstein, a sports agent who used to work at one of the major firms but left with his friend Ash (played by Aasif Mandvi) to try and make it on his own. For this act of entrepreneurial risk taking they’ve been rewarded with three straight years of losing out to the big competitors and digging ever deeper into their savings just to say afloat. After losing yet another deal at the start of the movie, JB and Ash rack up their brains trying to think of something when they stumble upon a cricket match on cable. The most popular game in India, JB mocks it. Yet he can’t stop watching (the epiphany moment of him channel flipping repeatedly between Susan Boyle’s first appearance on Britain’s Got Talent and the game is profoundly lame). The longer he watches the more he sees the potential in a vast untapped market for baseball: one billion people, unfamiliar with the game yet already fanatical about a seemingly similar sport.
After convincing a prominent businessman to finance the venture, he has just a year to go to India and find promising athletes to make pitchers in the big leagues. Most of Million Dollar Arm takes place in America, but the best scenes are definitely of JB’s culture clash in India early on (featuring a hilarious grousing Alan Arkin as a scout who can’t even bother to stay awake for the try-outs). That’s because the on-location shots of bustling, exotic India are striking in the way that few other countries are and also for the way director Craig Gillespie shows a real verve in these shots of the countryside and of massive crowds of Indian youth trying for a shot at glory. It favorably calls to mind what Danny Boyle did with Slumdog Millionaire.
The return home after the search has located and groomed two talented young men (Rinku and Danesh) finds the energy starting to leak out. At first it’s an amusing reverse culture clash with Rinku and Danesh (played by Suraj Sharma and Madhur Mittal, both endearing) now the ones legitimately startled and intrigued by a place with escalators, elevators, highway lanes with relatively scant traffic, and pizza. But it quickly loses focus on them to become a rather by the numbers account of how this one man stared down the odds to mold them into baseball players in record time. Along the way Rinku and Danesh are paid mainly lip service as they begin to feel like props (no more so than a party scene that goes predictably awry). Because of them and the presence of an attractive tenant in his guesthouse he falls for (she’s played by Lake Bell), JB begins to reveal entirely new, more thoughtful and caring sides of his personality in ways that you can see coming in advance quite clearly.
Jon Hamm makes a good go of it though—even if you can’t help but wish the leading actor from one of the smartest and most acclaimed modern television shows would get stronger movie roles. He’s exceedingly fine here, navigating the warming and opening up of this cocky, aloof person with ease. You can always see the just below the surface emotions bubbling under his impossibly handsome features. Hamm’s business-world persona isn’t that far removed ultimately from the advertising man he plays on Mad Men and he shows the same kind of cunningly intelligent thinking here no matter what the situation is, like a corporate office suite James Bond.
Making the central focus this one arrogant white agent is nevertheless a tad retrograde. Million Dollar Arm also has a whiff of condescension in its portrayal of Indians. We get some back story on these two young men, transplanted from their homes. But it doesn’t go far enough and it doesn’t paper over how much some of them feel at times like walking stereotypes. As a look at innovative business strategizing in America’s pastime, it falls short of Bennett Miller’s excellent Moneyball. But that was an Aaron Sorkin screenplay. This, by contrast, is a surprisingly odd pairing of direction and writing. Gillespie made the unbearably dopey Lars and the Real Girl and the forgettable Fright Night remake. The screenwriter Thomas McCarthy is a vastly more accomplished director in his own right with titles like The Visitor and The Station Agent to his name (seek that one out, Peter Dinklage fans). His last film, as it happens, was the sports-centric high school wrestling dramedy Win Win. It felt good without feeling formulaic or simplistic. Compared to that, what he turns in here feels almost hackish although plenty well intentioned and amiable all the way. Million Dollar Arm is easy to root for. That’s not always an attribute—or enough.
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