‘Eephus’ is an instant sports movie classic
Summary
Carson Lund's baseball comedy distills the mundane pleasures and casual heartbreak of sport
J.M. Barrie, author of the Peter Pan books and an enthusiastic amateur cricketer of limited skill, said of his bowling: “If I have sent down a bad delivery I can always pursue the ball, recapture it and send it down again." I know little of baseball, but the Eephus pitch sounds something like that. The Dickson Baseball Dictionary describes it as a “slowly thrown, high-arcing pitch likely to reach an apex of 25 feet above the ground between the mound and the plate". Rip Sewell, who originated the pitch in the 1940s, said it was “Fun to watch, easy to catch, but tough to hit."
Carson Lund’s Eephus (playing at the Red Lorry Film Festival in Mumbai this weekend) is fun to watch and easy to catch, arcing in a graceful, unhurried parabola towards the viewer. The film runs an hour and 38 minutes, but you could tell me it was considerably shorter or a lot longer than that and I’d believe you. This too makes it like the pitch. One of the players theorizes that the Eephus is so slow it makes the batter lose track of time. “I like that," his teammate replies. “It’s kind of like baseball. I’m waiting for something to happen and poof, game’s over."
A baseball field in the small, sleepy town of Douglas in New England is being razed to make way for a high school. To mark its passing, two local teams, the Riverdogs and Adler’s Paint baseball team, face off one last time. This game, in all its amiable mediocrity and occasional slapstick urgency, takes up the entirety of Lund’s first feature, which he co-wrote with Michael Basta and Nate Fisher. We join as scorer Franny is setting up in the bright sun; by the end it’s dark and everyone’s struggling to stay upright.
These are bottom barrel teams, but they still play to win. They do everything that athletes with skill and fitness might—formulating strategies and counter-strategies, promising hits and strikes, getting under the skin of their opponents. Most of them are blue-collar workers (“They’re just a bunch of plumbers and stuff," a young spectator says), a few in their 20s and 30s but the majority pushing 40 or beyond. You can sense the importance of these Sundays spent boozing and bitching on the field, and the void it’ll leave once it’s gone.
There have been great American films about impending closures, like Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show. But Lund’s inspiration was Tsai Ming-liang’s 2003 Taiwanese film Goodbye, Dragon Inn, in which patrons of a Taipei movie theatre attend one final screening before the establishment closes. Like Ming-liang’s film, Eephus is minimalistic and wryly funny. The game is soundtracked by a constant stream of wisecracks, the wit and wisdom of Sunday league. A batter on diet is bombarded by players naming forbidden foods as he faces the pitch. “Is there anything more beautiful than the sun setting on a fat man stealing second base?" someone speculates. A walrus of a man makes a catch with difficulty and, gasping for breath, says, “I need to be put down."
The first voice we hear in the film belongs to the great documentarian Fredrick Wiseman, who cameos as a radio announcer. Eephus has some of the qualities of a Wiseman work—you can imagine the aged spectator who might’ve been alive when the original Eephus was thrown turning up in one of his documentaries. It would be easy for a film like this to slip into conservative lamenting; one player imagines an “art class…with fucking easels" where the field currently is. But the film’s too clear-eyed to indulge in small-town-glory talk; if anything, Eephus, gently but firmly, makes it clear that there’s little glory or potential in this town.
The little I know about baseball I know from baseball movies. I love them all, from the silliness and heart of Major League to the wit of Bull Durham and the nerdy fandom of Moneyball. Most of those films, though, are about proper athletes, even if they’re over the hill or underappreciated or battling some demon. Eephus is the first baseball film I've seen that's about non-professionals. It reminded me of the 25-over Sunday cricket matches of my youth, the seriousness with which we’d try to replicate what we’d seen on TV. Even when the execution is beyond reach, matching the rituals allows for a sense of kinship with gods of the sport.
“Game of inches, game of inches." Branch Rickey’s famous quote being used for this match-up of drunk schlubs is amusing but not out of place. Eephus is about baseball in spirit, not the practitioners but the game itself, its intricacies and familiar pleasures. For all the cheerful filthy chat, there’s a melancholy at the heart of this film. When we finally see the fireworks display promised at the start, it’s as a play of coloured lights on the pensive face of one of the players. The last scene is Franny the scorer looking at the last cars leaving the dark field, repeating Lou Gehrig’s farewell speech, complete with echo (“Today day day day, I consider myself self self, the luckiest man…"). He ends with another echo, of Paul Simon’s lament for a way of life that can’t return: “Where do we go, Joe DiMaggio?"
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