Eephus

 Eephus, we learn, is the name for a certain kind of pitch in baseball -- the ball is said to travel so slowly that the hitter is baffled, can't wait to swing, and ends up swinging early, thereby, missing the target.  One of the players in the film of the same name has (allegedly) mastered this sort of pitch.  I am hesitant to accuse this laid-back, cinema verite picture of making attempts at anything so vulgar as symbolism or, even, meaning, but one could argue that Eephus, the movie imitates eephus, the pitch:  nothing seems to be happening, it's all belated and there's no narrative really, no plot to speak of, no climax and, certainly, no real conflict except the rather low-key and mild antagonism engendered by the baseball game depicted in the film.  The viewer, like the batter, is baffled and, probably, swings too soon at assigning a meaning to the movie -- you run the risk of critically striking out.  On the other hand, baseball is the American game par excellence and among intellectuals provides metaphors for everything -- consider for instance Robert Coover's novel The Universal Baseball Association, J. Henry Waugh (prop.)  and Bernard Malamud's The Natural.  So Eephus resists meaning and seems to be about nothing, while, at the same time, the picture appears to comment obliquely on the American scene, mortality and death, the changing seasons both in human life and nature, and the inevitable "dying fall" that accompanies all endeavors.  The film suggests elegy and, also, may be a particularly subtle kind of ghost story -- perhaps, the players are phantoms themselves.  In the end, everything fades away into darkness.

On a Sunday in late October, two amateur teams meet to play ball on a diamond that is about to be destroyed for the construction of a new school.  The teams, in red and blue respectively, are Adler's Paint and the Riverdogs.  This will be the last game on the old ball field.  The trees have changed colors and the film is bathed in golden light; in the woods, the leaves are falling.  There are four or five spectators who leave as the game progresses -- an old man who may be demented watches for a while but wanders off; one of the younger players, the only Black man on the teams, has a girlfriend who sits in a lawn-chair for a while but also leaves.  There are two stoner kids.  Another old man scores the game and his marks on the score-card punctuate the action such as it is.  For a while, a food truck sells pizza to the dismay of one of the players who is on a strict diet -- most of the players are middle-aged and overweight, some comically so.  The game is uneventful, although a tie results in the play continuing after dark.  The camera cuts away from the action and, so, we only barely see the game -- there are pitches, hits and fouls:  in one spooky scene, a player hunts for a lost ball in the autumnal woods but can't find it; the staging of the scene suggests a horror movie but nothing happens.  (There's a fat kid smoking a cigarette in the woods who is reprimanded by the player -- the searching man has to find the ball because they don't have that many spares.)  The captain of Adler's Paint gets extracted from the game midway because he has forgotten to attend his niece's christening -- there's a lot of foul-mouthed cursing about this.  One of the players says that this is the reason he never wants to have a niece.  If you watched the movie carefully, and kept track of names, you could probably identify various characters with specific traits in the movie -- but it's not the kind of picture that invites you to watch carefully.  Rather, it's more like a baseball game itself, a sort of benumbed tedium that encourages conviviality more than competition.  The picture has a hazy, October ambience (it's set in rural Massachusetts), possibly the result of the picture being shot on 16 mm or some sort of cheap film stock and, then, anamorphically blown-up to 35 mm.  When the demented old man wanders off, another younger (but still middle-aged) man appears and briefly takes over the pitching in the game and the leadership of the Adler Paints team.  Then, this figure simply vanishes.  We have the sense that old-time baseball players are simply materializing to commemorate the final game on the diamond.  The picture has some of the rhythm of an Ozu movie -- there are empty frames:  shots of vacant lots,  kids playing soccer with only their heads bobbing above the boards around the field, the sky with clouds drifting overhead.  It gets dark but the game continues, now a tie.  The umpire and other park officials call it quits but the game continues with the scorekeeper up in the rickety press box above the field calling strikes and balls.  Finally, the players have to arrange their cars in a semi-circle to cast imperfect light on the field.  The game loiters, dawdles -- the bases are loaded in the shadows and someone gets walked.  One of the team wins -- I can't recall which and it doesn't matter.  The film ends with shots of the players vanishing in the darkness.  One of the men has brought fireworks to celebrate the last game.  We see the glare of the fireworks only but the rocket in the air or their explosions.  A man stands in silhouette in the player's dug-out while the light around him flares in different colors.  

The film, directed by Carson Lund in 2024, has won a number of prizes including the Cassavetes award for best picture made on a budget under one million dollars.  It is lyrical and poetic but puzzling.  In the end some of the players get drunk on beer and end up just lying in the outfield staring up at the sky.  A clue to the film's method is the use of the great Frederick Wiseman on the soundtrack intoning various quotations about baseball, for instance, Yogi Berra's gnomic remark:  "It's getting later earlier."  (The picture seems to imitate Wiseman's technique in his famous sprawling documentary films. When I was in law school, I had a softball team and, on Fridays, we met in the park under the old Bunge building, an ancient grain elevator, to play.  No one cared about the outcome and we played against people we picked up in the park.  Since I was a lousy hitter and can't field, I played pitcher, the place where I could do the least damage.  We didn't gather until 7 or 7:30 at the park.  In the Summer, we played until 9 or 9:30.  But as the season advanced, in early Fall, we would play until the darkness made it impossible to bat or catch balls hit into the air.  When you're young, the sky looks big and is full of lovely evanescent clouds.  My girlfriend then was on the team -- she could both bat and field.  We didn't have enough players to allow anyone to be a spectator -- if you came you had to play.  I don't know if anyone else even remembers those Friday games.