Carson Lund’s Offbeat Baseball Comedy

Most baseball films aren’t, per se, about baseball. To take some examples: The Pure is a few prodigy overcoming trauma; Eight Males Out is about greed and corruption; Dangerous Information Bears is a foul-mouthed coming-of-age flick; Bull Durham is all about Kevin Costner’s intercourse enchantment; Moneyball carries the game into the data age; and Discipline of Goals (Costner, once more) is haunted by the ghosts of baseball previous.

First-time director Carson Lund clearly had this in thoughts when he made his characteristic debut Eephus, a film steeped in nostalgia for the sport itself, in addition to what it represents for a bunch of males previous their prime: the lengthy afternoons within the solar, the trash-talking on the plate, the brewskies within the cooler and the sort of camaraderie you may solely discover within the dugout.

In some ways, this existential and more and more surreal indie effort, which appears to be set someday within the Nineteen Eighties or 90s, is a Discipline of Goals in reverse. As a substitute of constructing their mythic area, these middle-to-over-aged athletes are squaring off on one which’s about to get torn down and changed by a college. In the meantime, simply subsequent door to their beloved diamond is a, gulp, soccer area that’s attracting an increasing number of younger gamers.

It’s the top of an period, maybe the top of America, and one of many charms of Lund’s unabashedly low-fi film is that this final and completely inconsequential recreation between a pair of minor-minor-minor league groups by no means actually ends, however somewhat drags on into additional inning after additional inning, well beyond sundown and deep into the night time. It’s baseball as a way to chase away the inevitable demise all of us should face. Baseball in opposition to dying.

If that feels like heavy stuff, for a lot of its operating time Eephus performs extra like an offbeat, old-school sports activities comedy — the type they used to make again when baseball was nonetheless the nation’s primary pastime. (In line with present surveys, it now is available in third after soccer and basketball.)

Crabby males of their 40s or above placed on uniforms which might be too tight for his or her waistlines, complaining about their unhealthy knees. A few of them take the sport too critically, whereas others are solely there to hang around. A growth field performs radio adverts (narrated by the nice Frederick Wiseman, a New Englander himself) for tiny native companies, whereas a pizza truck operated by a man properly previous retirement sits idle within the lot.  

There are too many characters available to concentrate on, though a type of narrator seems within the type of Franny (Cliff Blake), an getting older, die-hard fan who retains field scores and dishes out quotes from legends like Yogi Berra. He winds up changing into the umpire when the actual one goes residence, attempting to name pitches from means up within the bleachers. By that point daylight is fading, though many of the gamers are nonetheless there.

Lund, who edited the movie and composed the music along with his brother Erik (credited as costume and co-production designer), served as cinematographer on Tyler Taormina’s Ham on Rye and Christmas Eve in Miller’s Level — the latter which, like this film, premiered in Cannes’ Administrators Fortnight.

The 2 filmmakers share a predilection for turning slices of Americana (proms, holidays, ball video games) into tales that steadily lose their plots, changing into weirder and fewer predictable. In Taormina’s case the impact may be downright Lynchian (particularly in his underseen Happer’s Comet). Lund’s contact is extra lighthearted within the vein of, say, Richard Linklater (who remade Dangerous Information Bears again in 2005), even when the themes tackled in Eephus are darkish as properly.

“I should be put down,” one crusty previous participant gripes. “I believe that is it for me,” says one other as he tosses his glove to the grime. There’s loads of gallows humor about getting older and dying, though the movie strikes slower than most comedies and the jokes are hardly ever laugh-out-loud humorous. Lund is extra fascinated about making a sure sort of cinematic temper, not in contrast to the sluggish, sinking curveball (the titular “eephus”) that one reduction pitcher focuses on, and that appears to be perpetually suspended in time.

The movie sustains that “eephical” temper for so long as doable, simply because the gamers determine to maintain enjoying after hours, utilizing the headlights of their previous Chevies and Plymouths to light up the sector. “I’m in search of one thing to occur and poof, the sport’s over,” one among them declares, and it’s a critique that would most likely be utilized to the movie itself. However Eephus isn’t precisely a baseball film — it’s one thing nearer to movie-baseball, the place characters endlessly jostle forwards and backwards underneath no actual time constraints, watching the day and night time slowly move then by, merely out of affection for the game.