Baseball is America’s favorite pastime because it provides an experience that combines the competition and intrigue of sport with the relaxation and mindfulness of a fishing trip. It’s one of the few forms of leisure that doesn’t seek to conceal the sense of time passing, but instead emphasizes it. Maybe more people would enjoy art house cinema if they thought about it like baseball. As Carson Lund demonstrates in his feature debut, Eephus, the two share many similarities—both are often slow-moving, meditative, serene, wistful, even. Patience is key to enjoyment. Unlike hockey games or wrestling matches or action films, there’s very little spectacle, lots of waiting, few climactic moments. Most scenes in art house films end without resolution and most balls hit in a baseball game end up being flyballs, not home runs. But if you’re sufficiently present during either, then time begins to pass around you in a placid rhythm that gradually reveals quiet but rich notes of beauty and profundity. Sometimes it doesn’t hit you until it’s over.
It hasn’t hit the players of two rec-league baseball teams at the beginning of Eephus, though they’ve come to the game with full knowledge that it will be their last before the field is razed and a school built atop it. What these mostly middle aged, irritable, increasingly arthritic men really want is to stop time altogether, to keep their small town Massachusetts way of life arrested in the 1990s, when the film takes place. Their crabby demeanors and incessant squabbling would suggest they don’t even want to start the game. Truthfully, they simply don’t want it to end. But while endings can be put off, time never stops.
If any one moment encompasses this perhaps too well, it’s when two players sit in the dugout discussing pitches. One describes the film’s namesake, the Eephus, as a curveball that looks unnaturally slow and confuses the batter, causing him to swing either too early or too late. The other player says, “It’s kind of like baseball. I’m looking around for something to happen and—poof—the game’s over.” It’s not a bad scene, in fact the dialogue is delivered with such earnest naturalism, as is done by most of these little-known character actors, that it stands out as an endearing wisp of poetry. But it’s also somewhat superfluous, as the slow but faster-than-you-think pace of time is an ever-looming specter. Just replace “baseball” with “life”.
Being situated in the past makes these events over before they’ve begun. The men range from young and agile, to paunchy and greying, to approaching old age. Screenwriters Lund, Michael Basta, and Nate Fisher set the film during fall, just before Halloween, as the year comes to a close but the leaves haven’t yet completely turned. Cinematographer Greg Tango does incredible work capturing the gradual shift from balmy autumn morning to stale, mournful dusk while the game stretches on and on, the players demonstrating a Buñuelian inability to leave despite constant insistence on the pointlessness of it all and vocally resolving to “get this thing over with” more than once, only to continue long into the night.
Lund and his contemporaries, particularly director Tyler Taormina (who produces, here) are building a repertoire of slow cinema that borrows the spiritually confounding, culturally lost, and real-time durational structure of the Taiwanese new wave. Lund even cites Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn as an inspiration. Both films share a melancholy-sweet remembrance of a dying local institution through a group of characters sharing a communal experience inside of it. Of course, movie houses are no more Taiwanese than they are American, but Eephus infuses the concept with a uniquely American flavor. What’s extra special about the film’s rumination on the passage of time and the inevitability of cultural shifts is the way it situates these themes through the lens of an ever-precarious sense of masculine identity and a bullish clinging to relevance— two things deeply ingrained in our culture.
Without outright saying it, what these men mourn the most is not the loss of a field or a game, but their connection to one another. Outside of this third space, the characters have insular lives. All of them arrive ensconced in their own, lone muscle car. Few have families attending the game. Many have baggage, such as combat trauma or family problems or failing health. Towards the end, as the game has finally come to a close and the men begin filing out, one player suggests they all get together for a beer in the near future, a gesture which is met with half-hearted grunts. The game is an excuse to get together. Male friendships and bonds often face dissolution without the context of masculine coded social functions such as rec leagues, gyms, and hunting parties. As one twitter user famously said, “Men invented online gaming as an excuse to talk on the phone all night with other men.”
The loss of their field represents a chipping away of what helps define themselves as men outside of their familial and career obligations. And despite their blasé attitudes, they don’t take it lightly. There’s also no real culprit at which to justifiably channel their frustration. One of the smarter aspects of the script is making a school the thing replacing their beloved field—not a bank, not a fancy restaurant, not luxury condos, but a needed social institution. Hearing some of the guys grouse about this fact, stubbornly badmouthing the project, I can’t help but be reminded of some of our politicians refusing to leave office while on the edge of senility, bitterly criticizing exciting new movements and candidates in their party with fresh ideas for threatening the status quo. The difference is these guys know deep down that all good things come to an end, and not always for the wrong reasons.
While all this may sound gloomy, humor still plays an important role. Another striking combination, here, consists of art house rhythms with the hanging-with-the-boys mood of Everybody Wants Some!! Quite a few splendid one-liners get tossed around that give this ultimately bittersweet comedy-drama a touch of the absurd—a despised Italian sandwich truck with a maddening PA system touting its wares, a man named Bill Belinda with a wife named Linda, a couple of antagonistic skaters asking an outfielder “how many touchdowns?” In the film’s most blatantly silly break from naturalism, a hit meant to break a tie soars into the night and never lands. For all its cerebral qualities, it never gets lost in the intellectual soup or becomes formally uncompromising. Eephus knows, after all, that it is a movie about a baseball game. It aims to please. | Nic Champion
