THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, February 20, 1995 TAG: 9502180302
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Movie Review
SOURCE: BY MAL VINCENT, MOVIE CRITIC
LENGTH: Medium: 78 lines
TYRUS RAYMOND Cobb may have been the greatest baseball player of all time. Ty Cobb also may have been the meanest, most irascible, uncontrollable psyco-egoist of his day.
``Cobb,'' a totally uncompromising film biography, trots out the evidence scene by fascinating scene.
You'll get little baseball footage in this treatise; instead, you get a compelling indictment of mass culture - a system that builds its heroes relentlessly and is loath to tear them down. There is no disputing the baseball accomplishments of ``The Georgia Peach,'' but in a bravura, brilliant performance - the best of his career - Tommy Lee Jones shows us his flaws. Still, we are drawn to this magnetic, yet repulsive, man.
The result is a movie that dares to question more than it answers. In the relentless manner of ``Citizen Kane's'' search for Rosebud, ``Cobb'' goes after its prey with an intelligence rarely found in biopics.
Cobb played major-league baseball from 1905 to 1928 and holds the record for the most runs scored (2,245) and lifetime batting average (.367). He won 12 batting championships and led the league in stolen bases six times. Pete Rose broke his record for lifetime hits (4,191) in 1985. Cobb is sometimes credited with inventing modern baseball because of his ability to hit to either field and for his aggression on the base paths. Supposedly, he sharpened his spikes before each game.
Rather than chronicling a rise to fame, the movie starts with Cobb at age 73, guzzling booze, living alone in his mansion on Lake Tahoe, and worrying if his legacy will really be preserved. He hires Al Stump, a real-life California sportswriter, to write his ``autobiography,'' which he dictates with a pistol in his hand. The surprise of the film is Robert Wuhl as Stump, a man who opposes the whitewashing lies Cobb keeps putting in the book. Since Cobb frequently pulls a pistol on him, he doesn't fight too successfully.
The book became ``My Life in Baseball.'' Stump corrected the record, largely, with the recently published ``Cobb: A Biography.'' The film is seen through the eyes of Stump; as he learns, so do we. Nothing in Wuhl's career would have even hinted he was capable of a performance as subtle and endearing as the one here.
We learn that Cobb was racist and anti-Semitic, a womanizer who regularly abused his women and just about anyone else who would let him bully them. When we meet him, he is gobbling down pills and making stock-market deals that enlarged his fortune.
Ron Shelton, who directed and wrote this film, is interested in sports as a mass drug. He scored a triumph with ``Bull Durham,'' then followed it with the entertaining commercial hit ``White Men Can't Jump.''
With ``Cobb,'' his aims are higher: He is trying to show us that our own thirst for heroes is often blind. He takes a major risk in asking us to spend two hours with a character who at best is a jerk. In addition, he refuses to give us easy answers. Not content to just debunk the myth, he plays both sides of the fence, presenting a guy whom we will at times find likable, despite ourselves.
Apparently, that risk has failed, at least commercially. ``Cobb'' has not reached a wide audience - a factor reflected in this week's Oscar nominations. Jones' performance didn't make the list.
It would be an oversimplification, though, to brand Cobb as merely a villain. His life unspools in dramatized incidents rather than in chronological facts. After a wild ride down the snow-covered mountain where he lives, Cobb and Stump go to Reno for booze and women. Lolita Davidovich is vulnerable and appealing as the cigarette girl Cobb terrorizes in his hotel room. They also make a cross-country trip to the Baseball Hall of Fame, where Cobb was the first inductee.
``Cobb'' is bigger than any biographical film that has shown up in recent months. You may be repulsed, but see it anyway. MEMO: Mal's rating: four stars
ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
Tommy Lee Jones...as Cobb
by CNB