“Is this how it’s gonna end?”
By the time one of the small-town, middle-aged baseball players in director Carson Lund’s disarming debut feature “Eephus” says that line, it’s very late, very dark and, for the old baseball field — Soldier’s Field by name, a little smaller than Chicago’s Soldier Field — it’s the final inning before the ballfield is to be razed to make way for a new middle school.
Places come; places go. Every human being deals with loss differently. “Eephus” acknowledges that, but it’s a sweet, sidewinding paradox of a sports movie: sentimental in a quietly unsentimental and offhandedly comic fashion.
Lund’s film confines the movie almost entirely to the nearly departed ballfield, before, during and after its final game. Yet it doesn’t feel confining. Enough happens on or near any baseball diamond to get a movie out of it, if the right filmmakers are at the plate. Lund and cinematographer Greg Tango shoot and light “Eephus” in grandly scaled digital widescreen imagery, in daylight, sunset hours and the cloak of night, and that too is a useful paradox. Not much happens, but every shot is composed like a widescreen mini-epic of downtime and hangtime, without much happening or any earnest revelations to solemnize things.
We’re hanging with the last remaining players on two amateur league rivals, the Riverdogs (wearing blue) and Adler’s Paint (in red). The movie takes its title for the unfashionable floater of a nearly unhittable pitch, long, high and vexing. “Stays in the air forever,” one player complains, adding: “You get bored watching it.”
The plot of “Eephus” can be taken care of quickly, because there isn’t one. We get to know the players a little, simply by overhearing casual, back-and-forth observations and insults and banter. Some of them will truly, madly, deeply miss this place, and playing there. Others, less so; a couple of these men have been hanging on to this tradition, and their time away from other things, family or otherwise, with a certain amount of guilt attached.
My favorite character in “Eephus” is an observer, not a player: Franny, a twitchy charmer and die-hard Soldier’s Field regular played by Cliff Blake in a superb casting stroke. Franny’s devoted to careful, even obsessive statistical reporting on each new set of innings. He has been for most of his many decades. Setting up his folding table for this final match-up, we see a man in his element. It’s merely a bonus when Blake re-creates the most famous line from the 1942 Lou Gehrig biopic “Pride of the Yankees,” taken from Gehrig’s moving 1939 pronouncement that he’s “the luckiest man on the face of the earth.”
This makes “Eephus” sound like pure corn, which it isn’t. Its wit beams on and off a little, but it’s nice and dry. The script, co-written by Michael Basta, Nate Fisher and director Lund, has the simplest of structures and while there are complications and demi-crises, on the field and off, it’s all a part of the fabric. The innings come and go, as does the sound of a local radio personality (the movie’s set in the 1990s, more or less) voiced by legendary documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman.
“Is this how it’s gonna end?” The line comes near the end, though early in the movie, one character says the old ballfield will go “the way of the Hindenburg,” which sounds pretty grandiose. When the end arrives — and I sorely wish the final shot was the terrific image of Franny, filmed from behind, watching the players drive off for the last time — the feelings and memories in progress weigh more than you’d expect.
“Eephus” — 3 stars (out of 4)
No MPA rating (some coarse language)
How to watch: Premieres March 21 at the Music Box Theatre, 3733 N. Southport Ave.
Phillips is a Tribune critic.
