When it comes to the subject of community, David E. Kelley--the prolific writer-producer behind television's The Practice and Ally McBeal--falls somewhere on a continuum between directors Howard Hawks and Robert Benton. While Hawks's professional characters are bound by a knowledge of how to do what they do even if they don't know why, Benton's people, professional or not, have long ago substituted their own eccentric reasons for that elusive why.
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.
Leap Of Faith stars Steve Martin as Jonas Nightengale, a fraudulent faith healer who makes a living visiting small towns and giving hope in the form of prayer. Aided by his no nonsense manager, Jane (Winger), Jonas sets up his tent in a small suburb of Kansas where he soon learns that their hidden mikes, cameras and computers can't fool the neighborhood sheriff (Neeson). But, when Jonas is touched by a local waitress (Davidovich) and her disabled son Boyd (Haas), he learns something new about truth and what real miracles are made of.
