Editor’s Notice: This assessment was initially revealed in the course of the 2024 Cannes Movie Competition. Music Field Movies releases “Eephus” in New York at IFC Middle on Friday, March 7 with extra nationwide dates to come back.
In entrance of empty wood bleachers on a late summer time day in Massachusetts, two squads of out-of-shape, middle-aged males present as much as play a recreation of baseball on what all of them anticipate to be considered one of their saddest afternoons in current reminiscence. For many years, this leisure league has been the social glue that binds the boys on this neighborhood collectively. Nevertheless it’s all about to vanish when the native area is destroyed after the season, which ends right this moment. So the boys load their coolers up with low-cost beer, spend copious quantities of time stretching, and put together to provide their summer time haven a wonderful send-off earlier than they’ve to seek out one thing else to do with their weekends.
Carson Lund’s directorial debut (he additionally serves as cinematographer on one other Cannes premiere, “Christmas Eve in Miller’s Level”) shares its identify with a slow-moving pitch that has largely been forgotten by trendy baseball gamers — and it’s a becoming title for a movie that embraces the leisurely pacing of America’s nationwide pastime. Tv executives have spent numerous hours lately obsessing over how you can make baseball video games transfer sooner, however many a real devotee will let you know that a part of the sport’s appeal lies in its capability to facilitate socialization. Just a few seconds between pitches offers the primary baseman time to trade pleasantries with the runner making an attempt to steal second, and spectators can often discover time to purchase a sizzling canine with out worrying about lacking something essential. “Eephus” is a movie that understands this, and the script (which Lund co-wrote with Michael Basta and Nate Fischer), shuffles together with the rhythm of a baseball recreation. Exposition comes out in short two-sentence exchanges between pitches and longer asides between innings, permitting audiences to expertise the sport with the identical cadence that the gamers do.
As beers are cracked and meatballs are thrown, the sport slowly turns right into a stalemate that’s irritatingly adept at withstanding exterior stress to finish prematurely. Umpires attain the tip of their shift and go residence, however the recreation continues in entrance of empty bleachers. When the rating continues to be tied after the underside of the ninth, plans for postgame drinks are scrapped in favor of additional innings. When the final shreds of daylight vanish, everybody pulls their automotive as much as the sphere and activates their headlights. Various males overtly surprise why they hassle taking part in when darkness has stripped the sport of any precise that means. No person is ready to articulate motive, however they’re not about to finish a chapter of their lives on such an anticlimactic word. The reply that wins the day is “We gotta end simply to say we did it.”
Virtually too huge to even be thought of an ensemble movie, “Eephus” performs out like an unlimited tableau of the way in which this leisure league has formed a number of generations of males. Lund introduces us to 2 dozen gamers of various ages and ethnicities unfold throughout the 2 groups, however not one of the particular person characters are notably memorable on their very own phrases. That’s not an indictment of anybody’s writing or performing, however a actuality necessitated by the movie’s bigger level: These males are solely exhibiting us the elements of themselves that they create to the sphere, and years of taking part in baseball collectively has formed their little platoon right into a coherent social organism with its personal language, jokes, and guidelines of each the spoken and unstated varieties.
That’s why the lack of this particular baseball league on this particular area feels so profoundly tragic to everybody. Extra than simply giving up a favourite passion, every man is saying goodbye to a model of himself that solely exists in a single context. All through the movie, a number of ideas of other actions to fill the newfound void are shortly swatted away. No person desires to play within the different baseball league two cities over as a result of the drive is just too lengthy and the sphere is just too near a septic tank. No person even bothers to supply a motive why they don’t need to meet up in a bar in the course of the winter months, however the thought fizzles out in a matter of seconds. Even when the our bodies and names have been the identical, the boys who would present up in every other setting wouldn’t be the identical ones who’ve performed on this area for 20 years.
A variety of ink has been spilled over the loneliness epidemic that plagues American males within the twenty first century, however few movies crystalize the issue as effectively as “Eephus.” Beneath all of the jokes about males not having sufficient pals or outsourcing their social lives to their wives is the reality that adults seldom get collectively for the sheer function of getting collectively. We get collectively to do issues. Whether or not it’s a bowling league or a church group or a working membership or a PTA assembly, the significance of the particular exercise is commonly secondary to the social bonds it facilitates. However that phenomenon is difficult to establish till you’ve spent years doing the exercise. Nobody in “Eephus” has learn sufficient Robert D. Putnam or Alexis de Tocqueville to clarify that, however on some degree all of them really feel it.
Some of the admirable inventive selections that “Eephus” makes is the choice to not blame anybody for the social decay that it portrays. The sphere is being destroyed to construct a college, not some parking monstrosity or shopping center owned by an evil company. An unbiased observer would possibly even conclude that educating children is a greater use of this land than giving grown males an area to get hammered collectively. The movie’s solely villain is the passage of time, and its protagonists are merely dealing with the disagreeable realization that their period is ending ahead of their lifespans. It’s the destiny that awaits most of us in a single capability or one other, however no person desires to consider that. So we play these additional innings in pitch darkness, simply to say that we did it.
Grade: A-
“Eephus” premiered on the 2024 Cannes Movie Competition. Music Field Movies distributed “Eephus” March 7, 2025.