Cobb Written and directed by Ron Shelton Starring Tommy Lee Jones and Robert Wuhl A L S O_.T O D A Y Blue Glow "Dawson Creek" beauty pageant; "NewsRadio" hits iceberg Now Showing New video releases for May 12 Y E S T E R D A Y The best of friends Why straight women love gay men Sound Salvation By Sarah Vowell I Want My Camp TV R E C E N T_. M O V I E S Not Wilde enough By Carol Lloyd Two new portraits of Oscar Wilde miss the wickedness of his style (05/08/98) Woo By Mary Elizabeth Williams Jada Pinkett Smith stars in this sexy, sunny comedy (05/08/98) Deep Impact By Charles Taylor Sapocalypse now! The end of the world as Hallmark moment (05/07/98) Stephen Fry By Cynthia Joyce The importance of being Wilde (05/07/98) Home Movies By Charles Taylor Why "Rio Bravo" is the Great American Movie (05/05/98) BROWSE THE MOVIE ARCHIVES COLUMNS FEATURES REVIEWS INTERVIEWS

[ H O M E_.M O V I E S_.B Y_.C H A R L E S_.T A Y L O R ] When Ron Shelton started writing "Cobb," his film about the last days of the baseball legend, he hung three notes above his typewriter. The first read, "Sam Peckinpah is Ty Cobb." The second read, "What if Samuel Johnson had hired Boswell at gunpoint?" And the final one, "'Richard III' as a comedy." It's easy to see the influence of each of those memos on the finished film, but it may be the first note whose shadow stretches the farthest. "Cobb" is one of the few American movies that deserves mention in the same breath with "The Wild Bunch," although Shelton's movie isn't soaked in Peckinpah's flamboyant, doomed romanticism. Raucous, savage and dry-eyed, the movie turns on you like a beaten dog any time you start to feel sentimental about Cobb. Its spirit is summed up by the skeletal grin on Tommy Lee Jones' face and the blood-and-sputum cough he brings up from his gut: the sound of someone trying to expel a death rattle from his innards. Of all the good and great movies that have slipped through the cracks in recent years, none has been treated as appallingly as "Cobb." It opened in three theaters in 1994 to murderous reviews in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and Entertainment Weekly, among others, and Warner Brothers abandoned plans for a general release. The sense of affront in those negative reviews confirmed Warner's suspicions about the film and, since movie execs are always happy to be told they're right, they felt justified in killing it. The critics seemed to be asking how dare the filmmaker who had given them the sports comedies "Bull Durham" and "White Men Can't Jump" confront them with material this dark. Reading those aggressively stupid pans, I thought of how Cobb explains why his biography should be a whitewashed, mythologizing affair: "The children of America need heroes." The critics who attacked "Cobb" seemed to resent being talked to as adults. "Cobb," which is set in 1960, opens, like "Citizen Kane," with a newsreel overview of its subject's life, all high points and huzzahs, before cutting to the newsman dispatched to find the real story. He's sportswriter Al Stump (Robert Wuhl), whose 1961 True magazine article formed the basis for Shelton's screenplay. In the middle of a bull session at his neighborhood bar, Stump gets a call from Cobb, who wants the reporter to write his life story. Stump is stunned. So are his pals -- they all assumed Cobb was dead. What Stump finds when he drives up to Cobb's Lake Tahoe hunting lodge is an ornery son of a bitch daring death to come and get him. Since Cobb is alive, Stump, unlike the newsman in "Kane," doesn't have to rely on the testimony of ex-wives and business associates. In fact, he can't: Cobb's relatives will have nothing to do with him, and Stump can find no one who considers Cobb a friend. It's not hard to see why. Cobb greets Stump with a blast of buckshot, and holds him at gunpoint whenever Stump argues with him, threatening to kill the reporter in the blink of an eye. Cobb can't manage to die that fast himself. He's being eaten away by a variety of diseases that he tries to stave off by grabbing whatever pills happen to be handy and washing them down with bourbon, or else by injecting insulin right into his stomach. He appears to be keeping himself alive by sheer spite. Cobb envisions the book he's hired Stump to write as his way of controlling how history sees him. He wants a piece of self-serving, glorifying hogwash. Stump wants the real story, the truth, which Cobb (who's wrangled editorial approval) insists Stump cannot include. "Cobb" proceeds as a series of duets -- by turns hilarious, confrontational, compassionate and ruthless -- between these two men. In form, it's a road movie, with Stump accompanying Cobb to Reno (where the old man nearly rapes a cocktail waitress, played by Lolita Davidovich, then pays her $1,000 to brag about how great he was -- he's impotent), to a testimonial dinner at the Baseball Hall of Fame, to Cobb's Georgia hometown. The whole way, each is arguing for his version of what the book should be. There's no doubt in Stump's mind that this man is the greatest baseball player who ever lived. But to Stump, that means he should be a hero, not, in the words of Cobb's servant, Willie (the riotous Lou Myers), the "disgusting, wretched, sorry son of a motherfucker" he sees in front of him. Stump can't reconcile those views, so he tries to separate them, writing the book Cobb wants, while secretly making notes for his own unvarnished biography. He figures he can outlast Cobb easy; he even tells Cobb that when the player dies, he'll write whatever he damn well pleases. "I'll write slow," Stump says. "I'll die slow," Cobb counters. Cobb's belief in his own greatness is a belief in his superiority to almost everyone else, but he also knows he's a nasty prick. He plows right past the contradiction that bedevils Stump. And however much Stump tries to taunt Cobb into revealing the key to that paradox, Cobb knows that any "Rosebud" he hands Stump would be bullshit. At one point, Cobb tells Stump that his father died trying to catch his (innocent) wife cheating by sneaking into his own house; she mistook him for a prowler and shot him. Then Cobb discounts the revelation: "I was a prick before it happened and a much bigger prick after," he tells Stump, "and you can stick that up your Sigmund Freud ass." Later, when Stump accuses him of hating women, he tells another version in which his mother was unfaithful and her lover pulls the trigger. Stump struggles to hold these two contradictory views of Cobb in his head at the same time. (It's a bitch of a lesson, one Stump is still trying to learn as the film ends. In real life, Stump ghosted the book Cobb wanted and wrote a True article telling of his travels with the dying ballplayer. But it took him 33 years to finish the biography he really wanted to write. It was published a few months before "Cobb" was released.) Wuhl, whose great rubbery face has made him a wonderful second banana in pictures like "Bull Durham" and "Batman," uses the comedy of a regular guy caught in a crazy situation to draw us into something much deeper. Stump is our stand-in, awed and disgusted by Cobb. In the wrong hands, "Cobb" could easily have been one of those endurance tests devised by bad actors to see how much an audience will stand for. That's showiness, a different thing from honesty, which is what Jones gives us. This towering performance isn't just his best, it's one of the greatest and most daring in any American movie. Even when Cobb lays on the charm, or makes a play for Stump's sympathy by letting his voice subside to a quaver as he tells the reporter he's the best friend he ever had, Jones never goes soft. With a shock of white hair, his voice whittled down to a commanding husk and a body that seems both a mass of weathered sinew and a shell on the verge of collapse, Jones gives a performance that is a masterful marriage of technique and instinct. Jones has an unholy majesty here, a combination of body, presence and poison -- like the darkest burgundy laced with strychnine. He employs a death's-head smile like a taunt. His Cobb is the traditionalist as hipster, grooving on making people hate him, the put-on artist who's as serious as a heart attack. Jones and Shelton arrange the movie so that we feel sympathy for the man while keeping a full tally of every sin on his cussed, gnarled soul. Does Shelton admire Cobb? On some level, I think the answer has to be yes. But the movie isn't making a claim for Cobb as a man's man, the lone proud survivor of a vanished breed. This Cobb is a racist, a wife-beater, probably a killer (there is evidence that Cobb's boast of killing a man was true). He also has a crazed integrity and the fearlessness of the damned. Cobb's desire to invest himself with enough stature to stand up to death is both weirdly heroic and the thing that cuts him off from the living. And the closer he gets to death, the more horribly -- and magnificently -- alive he seems. Shelton dares to voice a truth most people regard as unwelcome: Sometimes greatness has nothing to do with goodness. It's a toss-up whether a critic's hardest job is convincing people that a very popular movie isn't much good or that a picture that got the bum's rush is a great one. An awful lot of people -- too many of them movie critics -- believe that movie studios know what they're doing. How, they probably wonder, could a mainstream movie with a big star that didn't even open in most towns be any good? Maybe by the same combined process of commerce and nincompoopery that caused some of the greatest American novels of the 19th century to be out of print and forgotten at the beginning of this one. Can there be greatness in something condemned, discarded and now (thanks to video) readily available? The answer, in the form of "Cobb," is now at your video store. SALON | May 12, 1998 - - - - - - - - - - - - N O W_S H O W I N G [ New releases available May 12 ] "Tomorrow Never Dies" "Playing God" "Close Encounters: Collector's Edition"