Clint Eastwood plays a broken-down, professional baseball scout in the last three months of his contract. His physical ailments are making it increasingly difficult for him to do his job the way he’s always done it—watching and evaluating high school ball players across the country for hours and days at a time. Amy Adams plays the scout’s grown child who’s struggling to maintain a relationship with her emotionally distant father.
Eastwood’s rough exterior and Adam’s romantic interests keep the story from lapsing into a psychological study of why and how this father/daughter relationship came to be so estranged. On the surface, there are plenty of obvious reasons—widower raising young girl alone, workaholic daughter trying to please her distant father, and years of not communicating and making assumptions.
The PG-13 rating comes from all the crude, high school guy-talk and the profane jargon we’re used to in an Eastwood character. With the professional baseball setting, I’m not sure the language is all gratuitous, but it seems so coming from Ms Adams despite her excuse that she learned it from her father.
Screen writers love to use baseball as a metaphor for life, and so it is with this movie, certainly the title. When life throws us a curve ball (something that turns out to be quite different from what we first expected), how we respond will determine our opportunities for the future. Trouble with the Curve is a simple story, well-acted, and true enough to be believable if not a little two-dimensional.