Million Dollar Arm by Tom McCarthy (review)

The 2014 summer-film box office was dominated by evil fairies, mutant super-heroes, and a fire-breathing prehistoric monster. Amid these loud cinematic depictions of violence and fantasy, Walt Disney Pictures released a rather modest baseball film based on a 2007 true story, Million Dollar Arm. The picture, which depicts Hollywood’s nostalgic rendering of the sport as the embodiment of the American dream, opened to mixed reviews and moderate commercial success, earning $10.5 million in its opening weekend up against the blockbuster Godzilla. The reality of the story portrayed in the film, however, raises some serious questions about the American dream that were essentially ignored by the filmmakers.

Million Dollar Arm focuses on the career of sports agent J. B. Bernstein (Jon Hamm), who represented such stars as Barry Bonds of the San Francisco Giants and Barry Sanders of the Detroit Lions. In the film, Bernstein’s business is struggling; and he and his partner, Ash Vasudevan (Aasif Mandvi), seize on the idea of finding new baseball talent on the untapped Indian subcontinent. Bernstein assumes that with cricket being so popular in India, there must be bowlers who could throw a baseball. Securing the financial backing of an Asian sports investor named Chang (Tzi Ma), Bernstein develops a contest called Million Dollar Arm in which the winner would receive one hundred thousand dollars, with an opportunity to win a million dollars in the United States and perhaps earn a tryout with a major-league club. Bernstein is assisted in his efforts to find local talent by Amrit Rohan (Pitobash Tripathy), an Indian with a passion for baseball and a desire to coach in the game. Also joining the talent search is aging legendary baseball scout Ray Poitevint (Alan Arkin), who seems to spend most of his time sleeping. The curmudgeonly Poitevint, however, wakes when he hears a fastball pop a catcher’s mitt at around ninety miles an hour. Poitevint is old-school; and with the exception of a radar gun, he eschews technology and statistical analysis. He knows talent when he sees it and is quite similar to the fictional scout Gus Lobel, portrayed by Clint Eastwood in Trouble with the Curve (2012).

After considerable difficulty and some cultural misunderstanding, Bernstein and his team discover two young men with arms that might be compatible with major-league standards. The winner of the contest was the left-handed throwing Rinku Singh (Suraj Sharma), who was one of nine children and the son of an impoverished truck driver. The young man did not play cricket, but Singh was a junior national medalist with the javelin. Finishing second to Singh was the right-handed Dinesh Patel (Madhur Mittal), whose background was similar in that he threw the javelin rather than having been a cricket bowler and in that he came from a poor family in rural India.

Bernstein then returns to the United States with his two pitching discoveries and with baseball enthusiast Rohan as an interpreter and chaperone. The agent assigns Singh and Patel to former major-league pitcher and coach Tom House (Bill Paxton), who, with his advanced degree in sports psychology and experience as a coach at the University of Southern California, was expected to teach the young men to play the sport of baseball. Meanwhile, Bernstein, depicted as driving a sports car and enjoying the single lifestyle with numerous attractive women, has his personal life disrupted by the young Indians struggling to deal with a new culture. Unable to leave Singh, Patel, and Rohan in a hotel, where they seem incapable of coping with such modern devices as an elevator, Bernstein is forced to take the Indians into his home, introducing them to such staples of the American diet as pizza. The young men also admire Brenda Fenwick (Lake Bell), a nurse who is renting a guesthouse from Bernstein and eventually becomes a romantic interest for the sports agent.

Thus, the Disney film suggests the formation of a family to which Bernstein is initially resistant...