Eephus

Carson Lund's atypical sports movie centers on an amateur baseball league in a small Massachusetts town sometime during the 1990s. It's a chilly Fall Sunday on which the league members gather to play the oft-postponed final game of their season, which will be the last game they ever play before their local field and run-down wooden 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 little to no intensity or even significance regarding who will win.

But these low-key nonchalant elements don't mean Eephus is lacking in dramatic steaks. Indeed, the way this film conveys the loss of a beloved pastime is deeply moving, especially if you're a baseball lover. Or a film lover, for that matter, as it is not hard for those of us who cherish going out to the cinema to see a metaphor for ourselves in this final game played by a bunch of inconsequential, middle-aged New England dudes. 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 specific type of East Coast masculinity and suburban American lifestyle that, while certainly not extinct, may no longer be very relevant.

Notably, the movie is set in the 1990s, probably right around the time Robert D. Putnam published his essay "Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital," which became a much-discussed, best-selling, zeitgeisty book in 2000. Eephus touches on much of what Putnam wrote about without actually having to spell it all out. Indeed, how these men interact as they play the game says far more about the causes and effects of losing the in-person social interactions most of us used to engage in regularly than any psychological study or political screed ever could. This elegiac, quietly profound little picture blends aspects of slow-cinema sports comedy to create a distinctive picture with something relevant to say about the slower, more communal, more stable way most of us in this country have lived for the past several generations. It 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.