The Media Tourist

Dennis Quaid goes gonzo for God in heavy-handed baseball biopic

The Hill
Starring Dennis Quaid, Colin Ford, Jonelle Carter, Bonnie Bedelia & Randy Houser
Directed by Jeff Celentano
PG

In theaters Friday, Aug. 25

Baseball and the Bible round the bases in this sermonizing biopic based on the real-life story of a young Texan with a degenerative spine disorder who dreams of becoming a Major League baseball player.

If you happen to already know about Rickey Hill, this story won’t yield any big grand-slam surprises. But for most mainstream viewers, not steeped in the obscure stats and historic miscellany of America’s pastime, you’ll be learning about him for the first time—how he grew up with stiff braces on both legs, how his rural-preacher daddy forbade him to play ball, how little Rickey did anyway. And how the underdog Rickey, ultimately, lived his dream.

Rickey is played as a child by newcomer Jesse Berry, making his acting debut, and he’s good—one of the best things about the movie, in fact. He’s certainly much more of a “screen presence” than Rickey as a high schooler, played by Colin Ford, a Nashville native who appeared in TV’s Under the Dome and several other series (including as a victim of Jeffrey Dahmer in last year’s Dahmer: Monster). He’s kind of a victim in The Hill, too, confined in a movie that seems unable to give him more than one dimension to maneuver.

Dennis Quaid plays Rickey’s father, dishing out fire and brimstone from the pulpit while his young son blasts rocks with sticks in the backyard, sending them sailing into the sky and over the trees—and sometimes through windshields. More than once we hear other people marvel that his talent is “phenomenal,” his batting skills a “miracle” given his condition.

Director Jeff Celentano is a former actor (whose movies you’ve likely never heard of) turned B-movie filmmaker (whose films, well, ditto). He’s playing in the big leagues now, sort of, with a handful of brand-name actors (Quaid, Bonnie Bedelia, Scott Glenn, Joelle Carter from TV’s Justified and Chicago Hope) and a movie releasing nationwide. Rickey Hill’s story is, for sure, an inspirational one—how a kid never let go of his dream, despite the odds that he’d never make it. It’s a feel-good movie for people who want a movie that wants to make them feel good, scratch their “films about faith” itch and likes their sports with a great deal of Bible thumping. It means well, but its real-life drama of the diamond, under the halos of the ballpark lights, gets lost in tedious, telegraphed tent-revival messaging.

And The Hill is Hallmark Channel quality up on the big screen, with ooey-gooey sentimentality, cringey performances, and a heavy, holy-hokum dose of Sunday School threaded by stories of David and Goliath, the strength of Solomon, sermons about water and rocks, God’s “calling” and being “tested,” admonitions about respecting “the Lord’s house,” and so many quoted Bible verses, I lost count. The dialog is laughably clunky and scripted with such a heavy hand, prone to speech-ifying and often putting words into character’s mouths that, I’m certain, they wouldn’t say. (“Hardscrapple,” for instance, wasn’t a word you would hear a lot in the rural South of the early 1960s. I was there, and I know.) And it just seems odd to hear a little girl—Ricky’s childhood sweetie—chide him about his batting and limited “body rotation.”)

In some instances, you can tell that characters mouths move to salty words that we spoken in a scene but later overdubbed into substitutions—“darn” for “dam,” “stuff” for, well, another word that stars with an “s.” This is a movie that doesn’t have the conviction it’s so preachy about—to let people talk the way they would naturally talk.

Quaid has a deep acting resume that has swung wide, as they say, over the decades, with some bona fide classics (Breaking Away, The Rookie, The Right Stuff) and some real dogs (Jaws 3, A Dog’s Purpose, I Can Only Imagine). This one leans into foul territory, as he gets all grim and clammy—and hammy—digging deep into fever-pitch fervor, insisting that his son follow his zealous path into pastorhood. It’s over the top, even for an actor who played Jerry Lee Lewis, Ronald Reagan, and Lindsay Lohan’s dad in The Parent Trip.

Bonnie Bedelia, who plays his mouthy mother-in-law, is bedecked in a wad of ghostly white granny hair and makeup to make her appear even older than her 75 years. The former soap star who made a splash alongside Bruce Willis in Die Hard looks like she entered every scene from the set of a small-town community playhouse. Oh, and she gets a deathbed scene so full of corn, it’s a real bumper crop. There should be a trail of it following her into the cemetery.

There are several moments that mimic other, better movies—a “railroad tracks” scene set to a retro tune that recalls Stand By Me, slo-mo slugfest batting a la The Natural. Church-going folks may flock to The Hill, but more discriminating movie fans can find a (sand)lot of better baseball movies to love.

—Neil Pond