Stream It Or Skip It?

The title Eephus (now streaming on Mubi) isn’t just a nonsense word – it’s a baseball reference obscure enough to zing, rather ironically, right by casual fans like a 90 mph fastball. Dating back about a century or so, an eephus is a blooping pitch that floats through the air so slowly, it confuses the batter. And it’s a rich central metaphor in this movie, about a mottled group of smalltown rec-league baseball fellas gathering for one last game before their field is bulldozed to build a new school. Carson Lund directs this no-budget, no-name bittersweet dramedy that’s one of the funniest movies in recent memory, a story about foulmouthed everyguys hanging out that becomes a philosophical reflection on the passage of time. 

EEPHUS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Fade in: The dew evaporates on Soldiers Field in Douglas, Massachusetts, a real-life field in a real-life town, pop. 9,000 or so. The world’s weariest radio DJ reads the news, including a bit about the pending demolition of Soldiers for a new middle school. Today, a lazy Sunday in mid-October, is the day for the last game ever in that spot, a 2 p.m. matinee between Adler’s Paint and the Riverdogs that’ll be played by a variety of dudes ranging from potbellied grayhairs to robust college kids, and watched by about as many people as you can count without taking your shoes off. Their uniforms are mismatched, players drink cheap beer and smoke cigarettes in the dugouts and the umpire has a hard time limit for this game, because his wife has plans later. What year is it? Judging from the IROCs and Granadas in the parking lot, it’s nineteen eightyninetysomething, but after a while, you wonder if the game isn’t playing out in a Twin Peaks zone somewhere outside time and space. 

Now, these guys. This movie is such a team effort, their names and the actors playing them don’t really matter. These characters function like they all have known each other for decades, evident by the lovingly crass manner in which they constantly bust each other’s balls. And they’re all weirdos: One flamboyant pitcher apparently thinks he’s Mark “The Bird” Fidrych on the mound – and is drunk. Another guy seems like he’s playing just so he can light a bunch of fireworks at the end of the game. And this guy over here, he’s Italian, and he’s on a diet, so the other team taunts him by chanting “cannoli” and “gabagol” and “pizza,” things of that nature. And boy, do these guys piss and moan. If they didn’t piss and moan, they’d cease to exist. They piss and moan that the field’s being bulldozed, but their pissing and moaning about that isn’t as astringent because they have to admit that their town needs the new school. They act like they’d rather be anywhere but here today, except there’s no place they’d rather be than here today. 

You know these type of guys, don’t you? “Why do they care so much? Don’t they have more important things going on?” muses one player’s very bored spectator daughter. “They’re just like plumbers and stuff,” mutters that same player’s very bored spectator son in reply.

Thing is, so many of the things they say are baseball bon mots, cliches that function as metaphors for life and death and, y’know, gettin’ by in this crazy world. E.g., “Don’t let nothin’ get by ya, I don’t care if it’s gotta hit you in the mouth,” or “Guess I’ll be my own third-base coach” or “Start a game, gotta finish it.” There’s this old guy, Franny (Cliff Blake), who keeps score on a notepad. He does that for every game. Every. Game. Someone asks him what he’s going to do when the field no longer exists, and he says he lives near the bowling alley, which tells us nothing; the guy might just disappear into the woods, or disintegrate into his composite atoms. There’s some hits, some errors, some terrible baserunning, a gorgeous slo-mo homer, a pop-up that goes so high it never comes down. No, really. Up into the mist, forever. There’s a lingering shot on a cloud, and someone says, “That’s a pretty cloud.” The game goes long, a tie, into extra innings. The ump bails. It gets cold, it gets dark. They drive their cars onto the field and turn on the headlights so they can see. Everybody just wants to be done. But they also never want it to end.  

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Haven’t heard this much cursing on a baseball field since Bad News Bears. Eephus is sort of the Dazed and Confused of sports movies – although Dazed filmmaker Richard Linklater made his own meandering-ensemble hangout baseball movie, Everybody Wants Some!!, which is the same, but also quite different (and indebted to Robert Altman’s signature ensembles). Lund is also the cinematographer who shot Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point, a similarly unassuming, nostalgic, under-the-radar indie.

Performance Worth Watching: Everyone’s batting 1.000 here, hitting the perfect-pitch tone at every at bat, he said, apologizing for the on-the-nose metaphor. I’ll highlight Blake for being the Elmer’s Glue of the narrative, holding it together with a bit of loose flexibility; nothing he says or does is overtly intended to be poignant or funny, but he’s so deeply in character, it is anyway. (And he reminds me of Michael J. Anderson, The Man from Another Place in Twin Peaks.)

Memorable Dialogue: Patter in Alden’s Paint’s dugout: 

“He’s f—in’ thrown meatballs.”

“Looked like a whole box of primavera from here.”

“Italian dinner.”

“F—in’ spaghetti dinner.”

“With wine.”

“Candles.”

Sex and Skin: Nope.

Our Take: Eephus is, of course, an eephus itself, a sort-of slow-cinema musing on “America’s pastime,” calculated to lull its audience into a trance with the elongated rhythms of the game, and break that trance with its frequent and potent stabs at comedy. And unlike legions of other sports films that hinge on the underdog’s achievements or a rivalry or a championship run, the movie’s not even remotely about the game. It’s about these people, a very specific segment of American men, here crafted by Lund and co-screenwriters Nate Fisher and Michael Basta, with such detail it opens the door to universal themes about nostalgia and the inevitability of change. It’s also very much about time, its passage, and how we spend it.

Lund zooms in tightly on Men Of A Certain Age who don’t want to talk about things, but end up talking about things by talking about other things that are subtextually about the things they really should be talking about. The irony is, they’re playing a manly and competitive men’s game that, especially in the context of their impending loss of a home for it, is where emotions that manly men shouldn’t share inevitably emerge: Frustration, elation, deep-seated appreciation for the singular positions, the roles, they and their friends play. 

And here on the final day in Soldiers Field’s existence, they’re trapped. Their game, rather amusingly and profoundly, just won’t end. They could call it. There’s no organizational authority dictating they finish, but the spirit of baseball within all of them says they must continue even as they see their breath in the chilly fall air, as they stumble around after a couple too many brewskis, as the night’s lurking shadows swallow and spit out their baseballs, which they lose and chase and find and throw and hit and lose and chase and find again. For this is a game not beholden to a clock, and only ends after all the balls and strikes have been pitched.

Most everything in this ingenious loose-vibe/tight-concept screenplay is hilarious on the surface and a quiet philosophical musing beneath. The comedy isn’t pointed, but instead naturalistic, rife with tossed-off one-liners and gentle absurdities, contributing to the film’s uniquely flavorful amalgamation of sturdy authenticity and understated otherworldliness, the latter punctuated by a soundtrack full of chiming grandfather clocks and avant-garde percussion. The script drops in nuggets of wisdom from baseballers like Satchel Paige and Yogi Berra, whose famous quote “It’s getting late early” precedes an exquisitely written speech about the eephus, which seems to defy the laws of physics: “It makes you lose track of time. It’s pretty mean that way.” There’s nothing like a leisurely baseball game to make time feel elongated. But it’s going to pass anyway. It wouldn’t be time if it didn’t.

Our Call: Eephus is a delight. It sure seems destined to be one of the best sports films of all-time. STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.