Eephus

Carson Lund's atypical sports movie centers on an amateur baseball league in a small Massachusetts town in the 1990s gathering to play the oft-postponed final game of the season, which will also be their last game before their stadium is demolished. Lund makes bold, original choices like giving equal weight to all the characters, having more of them complain about playing in the cold than wax sentimentally about the loss of their long-standing tradition, making the impending threat a new school rather than a greedy developer, and staging so much of this all-in-one-day movie in actual nighttime darkness. The film is structured like a local baseball game played by older, out-of-shape guys who aren't above drinking beer while playing, with lots of downtime between the at-bats and not a whole lot of intensity or high-stakes regarding who will win.

But that doesn't mean Eephus is lacking in dramatic steaks. Indeed, the way this film conveys the loss of a beloved pastime is quite profound, especially if you're a baseball lover or a film lover. Yes, it's not hard for those of us who cherish going out to the cinema to easily see a metaphor for ourselves in this final game played by a bunch of inconsequential middle-aged New England dudes. But the movie is more than a wistful, unspoken commentary on the sunsetting of long-standing American traditions. Lund and his co-writers, Michael Basta and Nate Fisher, subtly capture and convey a great deal about a certain type of East Coast masculinity and suburban American lifestyle that, while certainly not extinct, may no longer be very relevant. Eephus would make a fascinating double feature with Field of Dreams in terms of locating where America was thirty-five years ago and where it is today.