DD:. Even though college basketball’s March Madness is underway, WBGO’s Film Critic is getting excited that Major League Baseball is just around the corner. He’s got a baseball movie to tell us about, Eephus, that played the Cannes film festival last year and slid into home with a prize...And Black Bag, the latest from Steven Soderbergh.
HJ: Like some members of the French New Wave—Godard, Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, and Eric Rohmer who took their own criticism of film so seriously they made their own films, American Director Carson Lund is a reformed film critic. (For Slant e-zine in his early 30’s.) Lund won the Camera D’Or—Best first film -- at Cannes this year in the Director’s Fortnight section for EEPHUS, his small-ball, indie film about baseball that has French New Wave markings. In Eephus nothing much happens. But everything changes. French New Wave and baseball, together at last.
Lund, who grew up in Nashua NH, shot the film in Douglas, MA., where Locations found Soldiers Field, a rickety ballpark for the last game between the Riverdogs and Adler’s Paint, two teams of mostly older, cranky townies with a lotta notches in their belts, which have in many instances disappeared beneath their bellies. A school is set to be built on the town’s Soldiers Field, which is not much more than two cinderblock dugouts and a backstop. You can see the future, the next generation of kids, zigzagging after a soccer ball in the distance over the center field fence.
A reminder about Baseball that it is the only game in which the defense controls the ball.
Two guys face each other, mano a mano; when the batter faces the pitcher, he also stands alone against the many. That’s the enduring myth about justice in American films, from High Noon in the Old West to 12 Angry Men in the courtroom. It’s about how the two leaders in conflict on the field handle pressure, and since there’s no time clock that ends the game, the pressure ebbs and flows over what can be endless innings. Which is what happens, if anything, in Eephus.
The Riverdogs and Adler’s Paint in Eephus are Everymen, just taking a break inside the park, when Life outside the Park catches up to them. The Central Event has yet to Happen, like the asteroid that’s on its way to smash the Earth in Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia; doom is coming in fast over the centerfield wall, nobody can deal with it, the men are melancholic but funny. The End is hanging over them, what do they do? they pick fights. And they are reluctant to let go of the space where they can still give it to each other the way they did when they were 15. In truth the chatter outpaces the game but not by much. Eephus is a little about gentrification, and a lot about the life cycle, the way the slightly crazy Old must necessarily give ground to the Young, living the New.
The Eephus pitch is an anomaly: It’s hardly ever been thrown. It has a high arc that leaves the plane between pitcher and batter -- routinely traveled in the major leages at speeds up to 100 mph. The eephus pitch ascends like a lazy pop up and then drops down on the plate like a pelican looking for fish. Its origins is said to be Rip Sewell of Pirates in 1943 against the Boston Braves in Pittsburgh. Sewell won 20 games that year throwing the pitch—giving up only I HR—to Ted Williams in the 1946 All-Star Game. The Eephus travels a lazy high arc in a world built only to recognize speed.
Carson Lund shares writing, producing, camera and editing credits with others. The film is populated by actors I’ve never heard of and unranked amateurs, with a cameo appearance by Bill Spaceman Lee, the former Red Sox pitcher who lobbed an Eephus in the 6th inning of Game 7 of the 1975 at the Reds’ Tony Perez, who promptly hit it over the Green Monster giving the Reds the Series. The voice calling the lights out game in Lund’s films is Fred Wiseman, the Boston documentary filmmaker famed for putting a camera down in such films as Hospital, Welfare, Juvenile Court and Titicut Follies and trusting that the population in front of the lens would reveal the character of the institution under the lens and their moment in time. Ditto Carson Lund’s Eephus. Listen closely and you can hear Joe Dimaggio’s farewell speech as a benediction for all the bats that never made the bigs but loved baseball more than anything, as the shadows flicker in the deserted dugout.
On the other side of the wall is Black Bag, the third collaboration between writer David Koepp and director Steven Soderbergh. Much hooha over Black Bag being a glam spy thriller, this one starring Cate Blanchett as Kathryn, whose energy in this film seems to have been botoxed, and Michael Fassbender, playing a purposely pulseless spy, George, whose cool level is ratcheted up to where AI would go if it absolutely had to inhabit human form. Of course, they are married to each other. Of course, it is set in shadowy London, where stylish spies at all time ricochet around in the low-lit, in this case the very low-stakes intrigue of spies.
The Agency is chasing Severus, you remember that name as just another in a line of Roman emperors who set off half a century of war, or Severus Snape—Severus is always bad --in this case it’s malware that will presumably reduce slinky London back to wearing sheepskins. Quel horreur. There’s a mole in the Agency and Fassbender’s George -- more in the skinny Sid Vicious mold than the ship of state beauty of Sean Connery -- is assigned to investigate his spywife as one of the five suspects for treason.
Indiana Jones franchise writer Koepp and Soderbergh have also buried George Smiley along with the age of Bond for good in a black bag with Pierce Brosnan. Who shows up here as Agency Boss looking weary but glad to be invited in. It doesn’t crackle with brainy excitement, as you may have read. It’s a showcase for Soderbergh as director, editor -- and most importantly to him ---as cinematographer (using his parent’s names in the credits for both) to paste 50’s style over a preening auteur drama that will live on in film schools for, who knows, eons.
Black Bag is about style and no substance, while Eephus is long on substance, and is pointedly anti-style. Black Bag is for skinny people in black shadows. Eephus is baseball on a long day’s journey into night, and nobody dies except a way of life. Batter up.
