I came into Million Dollar Arm with a fair amount of prejudice: It’s packaged like just another crowd-pleasing trifle from the Disney machine – in this case, combining our national pastime with a slumming leading man and three bright-eyed young men from India who want a chance at the American Dream. It was a low-priority film, I figured; no surprises there. I was wrong.
Based on a true story, MDA concerns J.B. Bernstein (Jon Hamm), a struggling sports agent looking for a meal ticket. He comes up with an idea of going to India to scout for undiscovered baseball talent amid the millions of cricket players blanketing the subcontinent. He’s less concerned with whether his specific recruits will make the grade, than with the press reaction to his project. Publicity is currency.
After a not-quite-breezy India interlude (propelled by A.R. Rahman’s infectious score), J.B. returns home with two potential players, Dinesh and Rinku (Madhur Mittal, Suraj Sharma) and Amit (Pitobash), a baseball-besotted translator. The film is refreshingly even-handed in its parallel depictions of J.B.’s culture shock in India and the boys’ reactions to America, where their host lives impossibly in a giant house without any family except for the comely med student (Lake Bell) who rents his backyard bungalow. J.B. eats Power Bars for breakfast and doesn’t even pray; their first English language lesson is to learn the phrase “let’s hustle.”
Subtlety takes a long walk off a short pier in Million Dollar Arm, with the predictable beats (the boys get drunk! They ruin a big deal for J.B.! They take too long to learn baseball!) each arriving with machinelike efficiency. But there’s a humanity at work here that’s more than the plot-by-numbers deserves. All the performers have come to play, from the Indians’ dignified earnestness to Hamm’s practiced blend of bravado and insecurity. And Bell is a bonus: As the accidental ambassador between J.B. and his young charges, she does a lot more with her thankless part than might have been required in a lesser film.
In the end, J.B. stands by his men and learns a little something about life, yada yada yada … and yet the tears wiped away by the final reel are earned, not extracted through crass sentimentality. As I watched Million Dollar Arm I couldn’t figure out how this Disney product was affecting me so deeply, but when the credits rolled I figured it out: the film is directed by Craig Gillespie, whose Lars and the Real Girl (2007) is a quiet masterpiece of small moments; and written by Tom McCarthy, who co-wrote Disney’s Up and who might just be the most talented actor-director (The Visitor, The Station Agent) working today. Had I known of their involvement ahead of time I might have known what to expect; instead, I enjoyed one of the most pleasant surprises of the year – a formula film that is much more than the sum of its parts.