Peter Travers: ‘Trouble With the Curve’ Plays Like A Lifetime TV Movie
As the MLB playoffs approach, Trouble With the Curve looks to tell an American tale, starring Clint Eastwood as an aging scout for the Atlanta Braves. He’s losing his eyesight and recruits his lawyer daughter (Amy Adams) to maintain his old school integrity and reputation in a sport now enamored with statistics-based analysis. But he’s never really shown his daughter much love, and her own love life suffers until she meets a young rival scout for the Boston Red Sox (Justin Timberlake). With all this emotional promise, does Trouble With The Curve hit a home run?
Well, this isn’t an Eastwood-directed film. Instead, Eastwood’s friend Robert Lorenz steps in to take the reigns. “The sappiness level of it surprises me. I love to see Eastwood and Amy Adams together. They’re very feisty and so much fun to watch,” says Travers. “But why such a sappy plot?” Travers has no answers, but takes a page out of Eastwood’s book and questions a chair that supposedly represents the Republican. “I’ve got to ask you, ‘Clint, why so sappy? Why would you do a movie that plays like a Lifetime TV movie?'” Surely Eastwood wishes he could tell Travers to “get off my lawn.”