Review: Trouble with the Curve

Clint Eastwood's final (?) film appearance finds him playing an aging and cranky Atlanta Braves scout named Gus who is slowly losing his eyesight. He has rejected the Sabermetric revolution--alienating him from some of his colleagues--and his contract is up in three months, so he knows his job is in danger. Meanwhile, his single daughter, Mickey (Amy Adams), is a successful lawyer trying to become a partner in her firm. The story that follows is not massively groundbreaking, featuring family tensions, the customary discussions about doing what you love, and a romantic comedy subplot between Mickey and a player-turned-scout named Johnny (Justin Timberlake), that goes about the way one would expect.
This is not to say that Trouble with the Curve is a bad film, however. The acting is solid throughout, with good chemistry developing between Amy Adams and Justin Timberlake, and Eastwood providing a simultaneously sad and delightful portrayal of an old man with many successes and many sorrows in his past. It is also interesting to see what is essentially the anti-Moneyball. Whereas that film showed old scouts as obstacles to the hero's statistical plan to make the team a success, here the old scout is the hero, and the worth of the human factor the emphasis. The Atlanta analyst who is so confident in his computer analysis that he never even watches people play is a caricature--someone like that would never get a high-level job in the front office--but a number of Internet Sabermetricians do tend to fit that image, so it works as a corrective.
Baseball still uses scouts, and this film helps explain why. Not being a scout myself, I cannot speak from experience regarding its accuracy, but the film's portrait of their experienced analysis of swings and windups combined with discovery of character and mental makeup is convincing. In its emphasis on the value of scouts, this particular story slants against the stats, just as Moneyball was slanted toward them. In actuality, of course, both are valuable, but it's understandable why the film emphasizes what it does.
The film has its problems (e.g. a somewhat contrived, though satisfying, ending), and a bit more cussing than I would like, but is worthwhile for fans of baseball, Clint Eastwood, or Amy Adams.