Something to watch tonight: Monday 4 March

The Natural (Levinson, 1984)

It prob­ably should go without say­ing that when I identi­fy where a film or show is stream­ing (some­times only for paid sub­scribers, see below) no war­ranty is offered bey­ond the day that the email actu­ally goes out.

Titles come and go from stream­ing pro­viders all the time.

But last Wednesday, when I recom­men­ded Dune: Part One, I was sur­prised to dis­cov­er that it was dis­ap­pear­ing from Netflix in New Zealand that very night. Apologies, if you were sav­ing that one up for the weekend.

One way in which I, per­son­ally, avoid those dis­ap­point­ments is to col­lect phys­ic­al media and it is to those shelves that we turned on Saturday night to watch Barry Levinson’s 1984 clas­sic base­ball drama, The Natural.

Back in 2016, Madman NZ and their part­ners ViaVision put out a two-disc Blu-ray con­tain­ing the ori­gin­al the­at­ric­al cut (nom­in­ated for four Oscars) and Levinson’s pre­ferred director’s cut which (appar­ently) con­sid­er­ably reworked the first act. It had been sit­ting in the to-be-watched pile for far too long …

Adapted from a beloved nov­el by Bernard Malamud – and com­pletely revers­ing his ori­gin­al bleak end­ing – The Natural is the story of a baseball-obsessed kid whose shot at nation­al league glory is derailed by deranged fan, but who gets a second chance 16 years later.

There’s still a lot to like about the film. Caleb Deschanel’s cine­ma­to­graphy is full of lush magic hour moments. The Stadtler & Waldorf-style double-act of Richard Farnsworth and Wilford Brimley as the coaches of the New York Knights, frus­trated and philo­soph­ic­al by turns. Redford turns out to be a bet­ter than decent ball play­er – he did all his own hit­ting. And then there’s the polit­ic­al premise that America’s nation­al pas­time might not be base­ball at all but grift and greed.

You don’t have to eBay/TradeMe hunt for a Blu-ray of The Natural. It is rent­able from Alice in Videoland in Christchurch and they still have an excel­lent monthly disc-by-mail offer­ing. Other coun­tries pre­sum­ably have equi­val­ent services.

And, yes, the film is also avail­able on some stream­ers (at least at time of writing).

Where to watch The Natural

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

Aotearoa: Streaming on Netflix

Australia: Streaming on SBS On Demand (with ads)

Canada: Digital rent­al from the usu­al outlets

USA: Streaming on Starz

UK: Digital rent­al from Apple, Sky or Microsoft

Further listening

Last Friday I made my usu­al even­ing appear­ance on the Short-Cuts seg­ment of Emile Donovan’s Nights show on RNZ. We chat­ted about Dune: Part Two (obvi­ously) but also American Fiction and a late entry in the free stream­ing cat­egory, Vincent Ward’s The Navigator: A Medieval Journey which is stream­ing on Māori+ and Brollie.