At first, Eephus holds the potential to make one quite sad. For this writer, the effect did not seem intentional and was more about my response to the film. It’s a movie about men playing their last amateur baseball game on their local field before it gets torn down for a school development. It’s a confident debut, where director Carson Lund is enthusiastically staging his ensemble in a wide, intricate mise en scène, which is refreshing in a time when that art seems to be in crisis. But in some ways it also feels like it was for its own sake, as if every camera movement or snappy piece of editing is there because the people behind the images are just happy to be making them. This is not a bad thing in and of itself, but it does make one aware that they are watching a debut feature. The jokes don’t always land, and it can make the viewer feel like they have become one of the men sitting in the dugout, tired enough to just give up on the game when the umpires leave. In reality, this writer was sitting in a press screening for a dying industry in a declining medium watching men play a game of baseball for practically no audience and increasingly no point when the game isn’t even being officially sanctioned anymore.
In the twilight of their game, things start to get dark, literally and figuratively. There are no lights shining on the diamond, and the sun has gone down. The greens of the field turn to black, faces of the players sink into blue hues, and the sky is barely defined against the tips of trees. They can’t see anything, yet they’re still trying to play. The game becomes an apparent impossibility, but in that moment is an opportunity for creativity. What starts off as a banal game — if tinged with the particular sadness of knowing it’s the last one — becomes a revitalizing experience, where the men in their refusal to give up on their ostensibly pointless game find new ways to keep going, and Lund finds new images out of the entropic void of cinema.
Eephus is ultimately a success, then, though a qualified one in some ways, as its elevator pitch as a last-day-of-school-hangout-movie dressed in baseball uniforms ends up proving what a balancing act and how subtly driven a film like Dazed and Confused (1993) actually is — perhaps it’s not much of a criticism to say that Eephus comes up short in trying to match it. But it’s motivation to refuse to move on is thrilling, as are the ways Lund breaks out and creates a genuinely unexpected final two acts just by continuing the logic with which he opens the film. It may not rise to the hallowed ranks of debut masterpieces, but that’s okay — it’s a work that proves Lund’s considerable potential as a director, and that he’ll continue to keep on with cinema no matter how small, niche, or pushed-to-the-sidelines our beloved medium becomes. At the end, this writer felt less like the men on the field wondering why the hell they’re still trying to play this pointless game, and more like the old man on the sidelines, still keeping stats regardless, for the love of it all.
Published as part of New/Next Film Fest 2024.
