Alex von Tunzelmann 

Million Dollar Arm: 20% Hamm, 30% cream, 50% historical batting average

Likable performances from Jon Hamm among others are the best thing about this '80% true' account of a US sports agent's quest to find baseball stars in India
  
  

Rinku (Suraj Sharma) in Million Dollar Arm
A Disneyfied version of history … Million Dollar Arm, with Suraj Sharma as Rinku Singh. Photograph: Ishika Mohan/Unit Photograph: Ishika Mohan/Unit

Million Dollar Arm (2014)

Director: Craig Gillespie

Entertainment grade: B-

History grade: B-

In 2008, American sports agent JB Bernstein ran an Indian reality-TV contest called Million Dollar Arm. It aimed to find rough-diamond young cricket players who could be polished up into baseball stars back in the US.

People

JB Bernstein has failed to sign a major star to the independent agency he has started with Ash Vasudevan (Aasif Mandvi), and his business is slowly collapsing. The prospect of having to downsize his lifestyle and – horrors – maybe even sell his flashy car sends him into a panic. The film's characterisation of Bernstein as a total princess is fair and, if anything, toned down. By page seven of his memoir, also called Million Dollar Arm, he's bragging in American Psycho-like detail about his designer clothes and absurd watch collection ("30 timepieces, lined up as neatly as soldiers … Patek Philippe, Rolex, Audemars Piguet and Breitling – the reward I gave myself for doing well"). The only way to make such a character sympathetic is to cast Jon Hamm, who has an unusual ability to express the vulnerable core beneath highly strung men's control-freak exteriors. Fortunately for this film, it has cast him.

Recruitment

Inspired by the tale of Yao Ming, the 7ft 6in basketball player from Shanghai who became a megastar in the US, Bernstein and Vasudevan decide they're going to find a baseball player in India. They get Chinese businessman Will Chang (Tzi Ma) to finance their effort, and are off. In real life, it was Chang who brought Vasudevan and Bernstein together – and some sources imply that he was responsible for the original idea, too.

International relations

On arriving in Mumbai, Bernstein discovers that it's noisy, crowded, sweaty and rather idiosyncratically organised, all of which absolutely blows his mind. It's also an endless supply of cheap (in this movie, free) labour. The film's portrayal of the massive scale of the contest is accurate, with 38,000 Indians trying out for the Million Dollar Arm show in real life. The west has, of course, seen India as a source of people to exploit since the days of empire. Bernstein isn't taken with the romance or magnificence of India, anyway: "It's white, apart from the bit that's red," he says testily of the Taj Mahal. "And there's a little dog in the foreground."

Structure

As in the film, the real Bernstein discovered two young talents: Rinku Singh (Suraj Sharma) and Dinesh Patel (Madhur Mittal). Million Dollar Arm has been made by Disney according to classic Disney principles, but there's an oddness in the structure. Normally, Disney audiences would expect to root for the people actually undergoing a life-changing transformation, not for their fairy godfather. The film has a bash at letting Singh and Patel express their own personalities, but the focus is on Bernstein's transformation from selfish white man to enlightened white man. This can be achieved only when he realises it's possible to feel emotions for the Indians he previously viewed as product, and for the chaotic, kooky female doctor, Brenda (Lake Bell), who rents out his pool house.

Charm

The film has sharpened some of Bernstein's experiences to make his transformation more humbling and therefore, theoretically, more charming. In real life, Singh and Patel did not move into Bernstein's home; that they lived in a "beautiful mansion that Ash had found for us right on the USC campus". Brenda was really an immaculately groomed aviation executive. The real Bernstein's awestruck description: "She made seven figures a year, drove a Porsche 911, and owned a yacht." Reader, he married her. As for whether Million Dollar Arm tells Singh and Patel's stories fairly, the real Singh – who now speaks English – has said: "I would say the movie's 80% a completely true story … You know, they have to put a little cheap cream on top of it to make it taste better."

Verdict

Likable performances are the highlight of this Disneyfication of an already Disney-friendly story – but some viewers may find the cheap cream comes with a sweetness overload.

 

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