Million Dollar Arm (2014)

Credits: Director: Craig Gillespie. Screenplay: Thomas McCarthy. Cinematography: Gyula

Pados. Editor: Tatiana S Riegel. Music: A R Rahman. Art Direction: Mark Robins.
Production Design: Barry Robinson. Costume design: Kirston Leigh Mann. Casting: Sheila
Jaffe, Seher Latif. USA. English/Hindi. Colour. 124 minutes.
Cast: Jon Hamm (JB Bernstein), Asif Mandvi (Aash), Alan Arkin (Ray), Lake Bell (Brenda),
Bill Paxton (Tom House), Pitobash (Amit), Suraj Sharma (Rinku), Madhur Mittal (Dinesh),
Rey Maualuga (Popo), Tzi Ma (Chang).
Do not be put off seeing Million Dollar Arm by the fact that it is a sports related film, or that
it concerns a sport, baseball, that is practically unknown outside the US, and touches on
another, cricket, that is incomprehensible to large parts of the world. The film succeeds
because it is only incidentally concerned with sport and focuses instead on the persons
depicted in the film. JB, played by Jon Hamm, is a sports agent has just lost a star player he
represents, Popo, to a rival company. Desperate to maintain his income and lifestyle, and his
reputation JB, while watching a cricket game with his business partner, Aash, has a
brainwave. He decides to hold a talent competition in India to find two young men who can
throw the ball fast and accurately, as bowlers do in cricket, whom he can train as pitchers.
The chaos of the Indian side of the story, the circus of the talent contest moving across towns
and cities in India is well-portrayed. Indians encountered, who could easily have been
caricatured, are sympathetically portrayed. The necessity of giving bribes, one explains, is
simply a means of bypassing the system. Alan Arkin, brought in as the expert to judge the
young mens potential, plays the part, literally, in his sleep and effortlessly steals the scenes in
which he appears. The resulting winners of the contest are two young men from small
town/village India, who, ironically, have never before played cricket.
JB takes the young men to America, along with Amit, too short and small to be a player, who
has aspirations to become a coach and whom JB needs as an interpreter another character
who could have easily been held up to ridicule and is not. The two ingnues are yanked out of
the poverty they have lived in and taken to affluent LA. The young men would have
struggled in a big city in India, to them the USA is another planet. They are unable to cope in
the hotel they are put up in and JB brings them, reluctantly, to live in his large, bachelor
establishment. To one side of the house is a smaller annexe, rented out to a hospital worker,
Brenda (Lake Bell). She sees the young men for who they are, young, homesick, lost boys
and not simply pawns in JBs scheme to salvage his career. There is more to them than the
money they have the potential to earn, for themselves and for the man who has invested his
last remaining dollars into turning them into professional baseball players.
JBs lifestyle, big house, flash sports car also includes a succession of beautiful bimbos, while
Brenda is a passing presence on the outside. She befriends the lost boys, who respectfully
call her Miss Brenda, and she makes JB (JB sir always to the young men) see himself for
what he really is, an unfeeling, uncaring person, ruthlessly using everyone, especially the
young men he has brought over, to pursue his own ambitions. Refreshingly, unlike in most
movies (perhaps that should be all movies), in which the beautiful, young female star,
recognises the plain looking/geeky/older/ male lead for his true worth and falls in love with

him, here it is the handsome JB who looks at the tenant he has so far ignored with new eyes.
No slouch in the looks department, she is not short of attention from good-looking men, in
addition to which she is hard-working, has character by the spadeful and an ability to
empathise which JB sorely lacks.
The path to turning the young men into professional players does not run smooth. Bill
Paxton is the coach, Tom House, given the daunting task of transforming the young mens
raw talent into marketable riches. Tzi Ma is Chang, the Chinese backer, who makes it clear
to JB that he is drinking in the last chance saloon. The music is by A R Rahman, the go-to
composer du jour for western movies set in India. Along the way, JB becomes a better
person, learning to value people for who they are, not just for what they earn or what they
look like and finding true love.
The film is made with a sensitivity rare in sports themed films, playing down the glory and
showing instead the development of the characters. A sweet and tender movie which is about
two young men growing up in an alien land, about a cad becoming a better person with the
help of a good woman, about falling in love. Best of all it is based on a true story. Whats
not to like?
Vidya Borooah
30 October 2014