Viewed from the perspective of an ambitious, star-struck ghostwriter, this sorely misguided sports biopic attempts to probe the sordid personal life of the baseball legend who was branded "the most hated man" in the game, Ty Cobb. Tommy Lee Jones is superb in the title role, but
writer-director Ron Shelton unwisely chose to structure the film as a two-character piece, thus placing undue attention on the lackluster character of Cobb's biographer, Al Stump. The few flirtations with farce in this mostly darkly-hued film only underscore its inability to find the right tone
for its subject.
The year is 1960. While hanging out with his sportswriter buddies, reporter Al Stump (Robert Wuhl) is notified that he's been hand-picked to ghostwrite the autobiography of former Detroit Tigers great Ty Cobb (Tommy Lee Jones). Upon arrival at Cobb's mountain lodge near Lake Tahoe, Stump
discovers that his ball-playing hero is in fact a nasty, physically ailing old man who uses a pistol to punctuate his tirades. Before their "collaboration" can begin, Cobb drags Stump to Reno, where the onetime "Georgia Peach" shocks an audience by airing his racist views during the nightclub act
of Louis Prima and Keely Smith. When Stump takes a shine to a no-nonsense cigarette girl (Lolita Davidovich), Cobb knocks him out cold with a punch, takes the woman back to his hotel room, and attempts to rape her. After proving impotent, he offers her money to speak well of his sexual prowess.
As Cobb and Stump begin to work on the book, it becomes evident that Cobb wants the writer to whitewash his past, obscuring many personal scandals. The pair then travel to Cooperstown, NY, where Cobb is to be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. During the ceremony, Cobb watches a film
overview of his career (presented in its entirety at the film's opening), and flashes back to unpleasant episodes in his past: among them, his wife-and child-beating, his brutal tactics on the playing field, and an incident in which he conspired to fix a game.
Following Cooperstown, the duo journey to Cobb's hometown of Royston, Georgia. There, after being shunned by his daughter, Cobb reveals that his father was killed not by his mother, as he had previously told Stump, but by his mother's lover, who took him for a burglar. Confronted with the harsh
truths about his childhood idol, Stump chooses to submit to his publisher the sanitized version of Cobb's life, as dictated by the man himself. (The real Al Stump co-authored the 1961 memoir My Life in Baseball: The True Record. A more vivid version of events appeared in his 1994 book Cobb: A
Biography.)
Cobb's brutal behavior frequently calls to mind the character of Jake LaMotta in Scorsese's RAGING BULL. Unlike that head-on view of a crude, violent sports star, COBB functions more as a distanced observation of its subject, and not a full-fledged portrait. Shelton chooses to shield the audience
from Cobb's primitive actions with the "normal" surrogate figure of Stump, thus blunting the film's impact--no matter how hard Wuhl tries, he can't lend much resonance to "Stumpy" and his routine-sounding marital problems.
Jones, on the other hand, strikes just the right chord as Cobb. For much of the picture, he is simply required to play the character as a vicious old coot; since Shelton includes very little on-screen baseball action, it's only when Jones is given the opportunity to convey the character's
complexities--as in the Cooperstown banquet sequence--that the viewer is persuaded that Cobb is indeed a worthy subject for a biography. If Jones's performance is confidently larger-than-life, the film containing it is timid and uncertain in its approach, from the wholly inappropriate comic tone
of the opening sequences, to the clumsy scenes which feature Stump's transformation from schlemiel to chronicler of Cobb's much-discussed "greatness." (Profanity, violence, nudity.) leave a comment
