Yogi Berra, perhaps the greatest catcher in history, has been featured in Carson Lund’s film ‘Eephus’, a film about those players who are never most likely to make a mark, unlike Berra who is bound to be an impressive figure at the Baseball Hall of Fame’s round table discussions. Paying tribute to such a great figure in a lower budget film is pretty ambitious to say the least.
But one like to imagine that Berra would appreciate the pleasure of being acknowledged in a gracious delightful sundowner movie. The sundowner movie depicts a scenario where a group of middle-aged players who are just casuals gets together for the last match, last of the season and perhaps last forever, and wants to simply play and enjoy themselves. Who can forget, he is the author of the famous adage: “The future ain’t what it used to be”, right?
But now, Adler’s Paint and Riverdogs adult-league teams who have for long had regular fixtures on the public pitch at Soldier’s Field in a small village in New England, seem to be looking at a very different future. The last game of the month of october will decertainly be the last theirs being hosted at this venue since the fields are about to get demolished and redeployed. In another, less entertaining movie, foreshadowing that a corporation with a heart of stone that plans on replacing the existing grounds with some designer apartments or a mega market, would essentially announce an antagonist of sorts.
With the same uncharacteristic altruism of Lund and co-writers Michael Basta and Nate Fisher, they are here not putting up a parking lot over paradise. Here the pitch is bulldozed to make way for a school which none of these men in midlife crisis can quite whinge openly against though certainly some of them may be grumbling under their breath out of resentment.
Also, when speaking about their future, one should note that it is our past: Lund’s dramatisation of the film features a more stylized version of the 90s where his players are seen operating pick up trucks and station wagons where all the billboards are hand painted. There is a Plymouth undoubtedly with push button radio which airs these comedies of local marketing where the business owner does the pitch and tries hard and fails to be articulate.
Also in the background, there is an advert engagaged by creative documentary Frederick Wiseman, who gives this ill famed film an eventual endowement along with Bill “Spaceman” Lee, another legend in baseball appearing as a left handed pitcher with Red Sox in the 70’s. Among a pantheon of Indie character actors this film contains two of the most well known figures among other less well known performers. Some visages can bring about a sense of recognition and maybe they are not too much that they distract from the ensemble’s shared chemistry.
The game had a sole audience of a few family figures, a hardcore follower and scorekeeper named Franny (Cliff Blake who, laterally in his life, could be likened to Jack Lemmon), and two unimpressed teen spectators, who remarked that the league ‘men are just carry trade in construction and such’, all in turn the men began occupying batters’ spots. However, it is not the intention of visiting the place to witness the sport neither are the players actually present there to participate in it.
The sparse plot of “Eephus” unfolds as players huddle in the dugout, the outfield cutting jokes, beer cans tossed in the ground, clouds gathering thick and grey, tempers flaring and squelched. Church bells ring and commuter trains are shuttled, but as twilight approaches, one does not expect any plot twists in this scene. Greg Tango’s camera is pointed, sweetly irreverently, away from them, at the vacant dugout, which gets lit up offscreen by the sparklers and rockets of the aforementioned Fourth of July festivities.
As a very loose outline of the plot goes, mean Ed (Keith William Richards) is a pitcher who struggles hard to take the responsibilities of the Adler’s Paint captain, who leaves the game abruptly for a baptism, as Ed is opposed to Graham (Stephen Radochia), the Riverdogs coach, who works on the demolition of Soldier’s Field but takes forever trying to wrap up the game.
No obstante, se les contradice de forma directa argumentando que ‘Eephus’ aunque es un término que se utiliza para designar el lanzamiento de una bola curveada lenta y elevada, no tiene tanto que ver con rivalidades sino más bien sobre un ejercicio inolvidable de complicidad. Referido al béisbol, se refiere a usar el Gran Pasatiempo Americano para hacer pausas en el tiempo y para juntarse en una actividad que estos hombres son empujados por la cultura masculina de los Estados Unidos a no tener la necesidad de expresar de otra forma.
Lund was D.P. as well on the project ‘Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point,’ and like its director, Tyler Taormina, he is a producer here as well. Above all, they alongside their Omnes Films shingle appear to be at the forefront of a quiet, new nostalgia revivalist in American indie scene that is unabashedly heartwarming without the cheesiness, and is even irreverently moving in its perceptive explorations of the obscure rites of americanness that so many aspects of American culture are centered around.
And here we have perhaps the best rendition to date of this New Suburban Quiet that even — and probably particularly — those of us who have had little inclination to the game beforehand. It’s pearls of common sense and melancholic humor make “Eephus” a jewel which is very appropriate, because this is a film about a sport with a diamond as an arena.
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