This is by no means a rule, but anecdotally, there’s something about the sport of baseball that seems to attract hardcore cinephiles. Perhaps it’s because watching baseball, like watching a movie, is more or less the act of observing time pass. (And eating popcorn, or hot dogs.) Perhaps it’s because the sweeping arc of the baseball season, cut nearly into daily chunks by virtue of the number of games in a regular season, lends itself to slow-developing drama, a gradual tension build that echoes across eras and can twist itself into new shapes at any time. Also, a baseball player can have a longer career than athletes playing many other major American sports; with the greats, it’s easy to start writing some kind of epic biopic in your head.
I was raised a Red Sox fan (which I now bravely admit in the hometown New York paper, and pray for mercy). I came of age just as the team finally beat the so-called Curse of the Bambino. In those moments, it felt as if we’d reached the peak of some majestically rising action — that we were all players, somehow, in the grand story.
All this to say: “Eephus,” the feature directorial debut from Carson Lund, is a movie made just for me, and maybe for you as well. It’s set in the small town of Douglas, Mass., about half an hour’s drive south of Worcester and an hour from central Boston. It’s October, some time in the 1990s. The trees are hitting their peak colorful beauty, and baseball season is coming to an end.
But this is not a film about the Sox, nor is it, at least on its face, about anything epic at all. In fact, that MLB team barely comes up at all, though Bill Lee, a.k.a. “Spaceman,” the famous left-handed pitcher who played for Boston in the 1970s, portrays a minor character in the movie. Instead, the drama centers on two recreational baseball teams who’ve met up at Soldier’s Field for the very last game this diamond will see.
In a sly twist on genre convention — the small town folk trying to save a beloved public space because some terrible mean rich guy is going to build a mall on it, or something — the reason Soldier’s Field is going away is that they’re building a school on it. A public school. Its proximity to people’s homes will make life easier for every parent in this town. How dare they, right?
“Eephus” never really foregrounds this in the story. In fact, “Eephus” never foregrounds any particular plot point. The screenplay, written by Lund, Michael Basta and Nate Fisher, exists outside sports movie tropes altogether, though it’s most certainly a baseball movie. It dwells in some languid liminal space between hangout movie and elegy, a tribute to the community institutions that hold us together, that introduce us to one another and that, in an age of optimized life choices and disappearing public spaces, are slowly fading away.
That makes it sound very serious, which “Eephus” is not. The arc is simplicity itself: The teams gather to play the game, which goes much longer than they’d expected and then, at the end, they go home. In between, the men fret, spit, argue, josh around and occasionally hit the ball. They lament the end of their ball-playing era, but whenever someone brings up just playing on the field two towns over, they loudly and flatly refuse: That field’s no good and the town is lousy, too. (Their language is slightly stronger than what I can print here.)
There are some delightful Easter eggs in the film for natives of the region — I chuckled, nostalgically, at the ad for the Ground Round painted onto the fence — but there are some for cinephiles, too. No one character emerges as the protagonist, though certain faces will feel familiar from other small indie films. Yet the most prominent actor, aside from Lee, is never seen: a radio announcer named Branch Moreland, whom we hear early on talking about the field’s closure and other local news, and who offers pearls of wisdom between the movie’s acts, each named for the time of day the game is entering (“Midday,” “Golden Hour”). Moreland, hilariously, is voiced by the documentarian Frederick Wiseman, a Boston native and one of the most prolific and celebrated American directors of all time, but hardly known as an actor.
This casting is far from gimmicky — though radio broadcast has always been vital to the sport, Wiseman’s voice is not exactly recognizable to your average moviegoer. But his inclusion seems a tad consequential all the same: Something about “Eephus” reminds me of Wiseman’s long, slow, methodical probing of institutions and of human behavior more broadly. It’s not an observational documentary, but you can feel the influence.
Evident, too, is the influence of the game itself. The movie is named for a particular kind of pitch, which one player explains to another during a lull in the action. An eephus pitch is unnaturally slow, aiming to confuse the batter. “Stays in the air forever,” the player explains. “You get bored watching it. I get bored.” It makes the batter “lose track of time,” he concludes. “It’s pretty mean that way.”
“I like that,” his companion replies. “It’s kind of like baseball. I’m looking around for something to happen, and poof, game’s over.”
That describes watching baseball, but it also describes watching “Eephus,” a movie in which nothing really happens but many things occur nonetheless. It’s notable that among the film’s producers is Tyler Taormina, the director of last year’s wonderful “Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point,” on which the “Eephus” director Lund served as cinematographer. There’s a harmony between them, both being movies in which a group of people come together to observe an event that — in a way very unlike a Hollywood movie template — turns out to not be significant. It’s just another moment in their lives, small things learned and relationships shifted, but no great realization, no great revelation, no great apocalypse. Just the passage of time.
“Eephus” takes place over the course of one day, starting in the morning and heading toward evening, the darkness falling just as the end of this game, and this season in the players’ lives, comes to an end. Baseball season starts with the first warmth of spring and ends in the waning weather of fall, the time when you can feel the chill of winter coming. Maybe that’s why I can’t help but wax poetic: The season mirrors the rise and fall of the sun, the days lengthening and shortening, the cold giving way to heat and then back again. The earth goes around the sun, and a new baseball season comes.
The post ‘Eephus’ Review: One Last Game appeared first on New York Times.
