DAN WEBSTER:
In his song “Glory Days,” Bruce Springsteen opens with a tale about a guy he knew from high school “who was a big baseball player.” As the two share a few drinks together, the guy can’t stop talking about those “glory days” he once knew and how “they’ll pass you by.”
That song kept ringing in my head as I watched the streaming feature Eephus, a small, independent movie directed and co-written by Carson Lund. Just as Springsteen’s song is about days past when life was better and seemed so full of promise, Lund’s movie follows a group of men who—for one last time—are trying to recapture the magic feeling that tossing around a baseball holds for them.
The setting is a field set outside a small Massachusetts town. It’s sometime in the 1990s and two adult recreation-league teams, the Riverdogs and Alder’s Paint, have gathered on a chilly fall afternoon to play what looks to be the final game before the season ends. It may be the last game forever as plans call for a new school to be built where the field now stands.
Yet what Lund gives us is more Field of Dreams, one of the great baseball films ever, than anything involving actual competition. At its heart, Eephus adheres to the notion that of all sports—professional or amateur—baseball carries a special sensibility, one wrapped up in mythmaking reflective of grace and honor and of a past that is unspoiled by the inadequacies of reality.
Real baseball history, of course, is replete with racism, cheating and betting scandals, plus greedy owners who treated even the great players as if they were indentured servants. But that’s what myths are for, and it’s the source of their power—to see ourselves and our pasts as better than they really were.
Not that what Lund has put on the screen has much of the kind of grandeur that Kevin Costner’s Field of Dreams character feels when he hears a voice tell him, “If you build it, he will come.”
Instead, Lund’s portrait is of mostly working-class men—and a student or two—who gather to drink, to cuss (the movie is full of variations on the F-word), to joust with each other and, finally, to play ball—even though most of them are far past their prime. It’s questionable whether some ever had primes.
What happens on the field isn’t even all that important. One of the conceits that Lund and his co-screenwriters, Michael Basta and Nate Fisher, concocted is that the game goes on and on, the way baseball games do when the score is tied. Even though they gripe and moan, and at least one of the players is unwillingly pulled away to attend a christening, it’s clear that no one really wants things to end.
Whether that’s because of their love of the game, or that they simply don’t want to return to their ordinary daily lives or, that they’re lost, each in his one personal sense of nostalgia, is never made clear. Nor does it really matter. Because all can be true at once.
Most of the cast is made up actors few moviegoers are apt to recognize. Lund said in an NPR interview that he was looking for actors who resembled people from the actual area, actors with “faces,” he said, “that have a lot of wrinkles, that have a sense of history kind of carved into it.” And he accomplishes that.
One of the best faces belongs to Franny (played by Cliff Blake), the league’s longtime scorer whose inning-by-inning recap acts as the film’s chapters. Another is the real former major-league pitcher Bill “Spaceman” Lee, who actually knows how to throw an eephus, which is described as: “a very high-arcing off-speed pitch.”
Other characters include a family member or two, a girlfriend, one wizened old spectator and a guy selling pizzas. Lund even uses the legendary documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman as his film’s narrator.
It’s the eephus pitch itself, though, that is the film’s central metaphor, symbolizing how slowly time passes until, one day—poof!—it’s gone by.
Which as Springsteen sings, can happen “in the wink of a young girl's eye.”
For Spokane Public Radio, I’m Dan Webster.
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Movies 101 host Dan Webster is the senior film critic for Spokane Public Radio and a blogger for spokesman.com.
