The Babe

OK, this may be guilty pleasure time.

"The Babe" is shamelessly overblown and sentimental. In fact, this Hollywood biography of baseball legend Babe Ruth is every bit as blustering and excessive as the character himself.

Don't think "Eight Men Out." Think "The Natural."

However, the saving grace here is the central performance by John Goodman — and he is magnificent.

With a putty nose and lowered voice-register (and despite his being a bit too heavy), Goodman even physically resembles Ruth. Right down to Ruth's childlike trot around the bases following a home run.

The film opens with Ruth being dumped off at a Catholic home for "incorrigible" boys. His parents don't visit, and he is continually taunted by the other boys.

But one day, while being forced to play baseball, Ruth discovers an uncanny ability for hitting the ball — simply by switching from his right-handed swing to a left-handed swing.

Soon, he's picked up by a baseball scout and leaves the home (here we see Goodman as a not very convincing 17-year-old Babe). Soon, he's climbing the baseball ranks, setting home-run rec-ords and rolling in dough.

But he's still undisciplined and crass, and he never does learn to control his appetites — any of his appetites. (The film's big joke is Ruth's asking people to pull his finger, which prompts flatulence.)

Soon, he falls for and marries a conservative, young waitress (Trini Alvarado, an ironic bit of casting for those who remember her as Bette Midler's daughter in "Stella," in which Goodman co-starred). But it is a doomed marriage, and eventually he meets his match in older, wiser Kelly McGillis.

While the film attempts to show us the unsavory elements of Ruth's life — his gluttony, debauchery and selfishness — it ultimately excuses them because Ruth didn't get any love as a child. As a result, this film is every bit as hopelessly romanticized as the sanitized 1948 biography that starred William Bendix.

Certainly this restrained, PG-rated look at the Sultan of Swat is preferable to what could have been a hard R-rated version. But veteran director Arthur Hiller seems to have lost his edge since he helmed "The Americanization of Emily," "The Hospital" and "Silver Streak" in better days. (His most recent effort was the awful Richard Pryor-Gene Wilder comedy "See No Evil, Hear No Evil.")

Worse, Hiller and screenwriter/producer John Fusco ("Crossroads," the current "Thunderheart") have chosen an episodic film style that leaves the film's many supporting characters with little to do — and what they do have is often banal. (Despite the accompanying huge orchestrations of Elmer Bernstein's flamboyant score.)

Yet, with all this, Goodman more than makes up for the film's lapses. His full-throttle performance blows everyone else off the screen and allows him to get away with some outrageously sentimental moments.

I occasionally shook my head, but it would be a lie to deny that "The Babe" got to me.

It's rated PG for violence, profanity, vulgarity and sex.