The men who arrive at a soon-to-be-demolished baseball field for a final recreational matchup in Carson Lund’s directorial debut Eephus (Music Box, $34.95 Blu-ray, $29.95 DVD) are not soon for the majors, or even the minor leagues. These characters creak and smoke and curse. Many are boomers, or close to it. “I think we could all use some medical work,” one player says, in a quiet moment of dugout reflection. You can feel the labor of their every movement, from winding up for a pitch to sliding into a base, each action verging on slow motion. There is no urgency to their playing, and no stakes in the outcome.
Eephus is a sports movie because it centers on sports — the entire screen time is consumed by baseball. Yet it’s unlike any sports film you’ve ever seen, subverting the genre’s conventions of on-field, or on-court, or on-ice drama escalating toward glory or heartbreak. The meaninglessness of the game allows Lund to explore issues less related to wins and losses than to anthropology, to male bonding, to the inexorable churn of gentrification.
In a supplementary interview on the Blu-ray, Lund says he took inspiration not from the great sports films but the great films about institutions coming to an end — such as The Last Picture Show, Goodbye, Dragon Inn and Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets. Eephus belongs in this canon. As the hour of the players’ final game grows late, literally and figuratively, this otherwise wry and observant comedy adopts an aching sense of impending loss. Bearing witness to the twilight of a hobby, a community, a necessary escape from the workaday, Eephus is nothing less than an elegy for a way of life.
The setting is Lund’s familiar stomping grounds of Massachusetts, evidently in the 1990s, though its pleasures derive in part from its lack of temporal specificity. By the look of the players’ cars and the bulky dugout boombox, it could just as easily take place in the 1970s or even a present-day game where cellphones are prohibited from the ballfield. We learn in the scratchy voice of a local radio DJ that Soldiers Field will soon be demolished to pave way for a school, leaving the Adler’s Paint recreational baseball team and their rivals, the Riverdogs, without a place to play.
This exposition is delivered by none other than Frederick Wiseman, the 95-year-old documentary pioneer, in an apt voice cameo. With its wooly, seemingly unscripted feel and its absence of judgment, Lund’s film could almost qualify as a Wiseman doc (Wiseman would simply have called it Baseball), were it not for Greg Tango’s artfully composed and acutely storyboarded cinematography. There are shots in Eephus that echo Gregory Crewdson paintings in their visions of beauty and isolation in suburbia.
What to say of the cast, 25 strong? You’ll recognize few if any of the actors in this marvelous, Altmanesque ensemble, but all wear these roles like their characters’ weathered mitts. Cliff Blake is especially endearing as Franny, the players’ volunteer scorekeeper and a philosopher of all things baseball, who takes his job as seriously as if every match were a World Series game. In a delightful cameo, Bill “Spaceman” Lee, a retired Major League pitcher and onetime presidential candidate, materializes out of the ether mid-game to share some banter with the players, pitch an inning — he hurls the titular eephus pitch, a tricky, gravity-defying curveball that confounds the hitter — and then promptly disappears.
I see Lee’s angelic intervention as Lund’s winking, baggy riff on the tradition of the eschatological baseball movie, where miracles often descend from on high. By the point in his cameo, the game’s structure has begun to collapse, necessitating his arrival. First, the Adler’s Paint team loses its captain to a forgotten obligation: His family members arrive to pick him up for his niece’s christening, which in turn inspires the film’s funniest line, from a teammate: “That’s why I’m never having a niece.” Then, as the match drags on, the contracted umpire leaves after serving his time, and balls and strikes begin to be adjudicated by the honor system. The players start to run out of baseballs, scouring the nearby woods for errant fly balls. Darkness descends, and the participants park their cars onto the field, lighting the action, dimly and imperfectly, with their headlights.
As fatigue and frustration build, and the ninth inning seems perpetually out of reach, Eephus borders on existential satire — Sartre and Buñuel meeting on a purgatorial diamond — until it ends, as all things must, in an anticlimax befitting a game in which, to paraphrase Whose Line Is It Anyway?, the points don’t matter.
Of course, the closing of one door could open another. The next closest field, we’re told on more than one occasion, will now be 30 minutes away, which should be doable, but which the players tacitly acknowledge may as well be on Mars. These men had a thing, and now they no longer have it.
Putting aside all the actual inside-baseball references that populate the script like confetti, Eephus is a story that is timeless and universal, capturing a loss far more important than the one on the scoreboard. This sports movie gets its heartbreak ending after all.