Cobb

The subject of Ron Shelton's brilliant new movie is Ty Cobb (played by Tommy Lee Jones), who was, by consensus, not only the greatest all-around baseball player who ever lived, but also the meanest, the dirtiest, the most arrogant, and the most unscrupulous. Shelton's screenplay focusses on Cobb in 1960 and 1961-seventy-three years old, dying of cancer, and writing his memoirs. There isn't a trace of sentimentality in the picture. Cobb never goes soft on us, even as he nears death; he's a monster of mythic proportions, bellowing and thrashing and belching fire right to the end. Jones, in the spirit of the man he's playing, attacks the role with breathtaking ferocity. Together, he and Shelton create a grimly comic portrait of the artist as an old coot. Also with Robert Wuhl (as Cobb's unfortunate literary collaborator, Al Stump) and Lolita Davidovich.