The editor’s note: This review was originally published in 2024 Kanes Film Festival. Music Box movies release ”Efhus“In New York at the IFC Center on Friday, March 7 with more national dates to come.
In front of empty wooden bleach on a late summer day in Massachusetts, two troops of designs, middle -aged men show up to play a baseball game on what they all expect to be one of their saddest afternoons in recent memory. For decades, this recreational has been the social glue that binds the men in this society together. But it is about to disappear when the local field is destroyed after the season, which ends today. So the men charge their coolers with cheap beer, spend large amounts of time stretching and preparing to give their summer a wonderful broadcast before they have to find something else to do with their weekends.
Carson Lund’s director’s debut (he also serves as a movie on another Cannes premiere, “Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point”) share its name with a slow touching pitch that has largely been forgotten by modern baseball players-and it is a suitable title for a film that encompasses the leisure stimulation of US national pastime. Television managers have spent countless hours in recent years obsessed with how to get baseball games to move faster, but many a real dedicated will say that part of the game’s charm lies in its ability to facilitate socialization. A few seconds between pitch, the first bass man gives time to change pleases with the runner trying to steal others, and spectators can usually find time to buy a sausage without worrying about missing something important. “Eephus” is a movie that understands this, and the script (which Lund collaborated with Michael Basta and Nate Fischer), mixes with the rhythm of a baseball game. Exposition comes out in short two-sentence exchanges between pitch and longer pages between rounds, which allows the audience to experience the game with the same cadence as the players do.
When beer is cracked and meatballs are thrown, the game is slowly transformed into a deadlock that is skillfully at the opposing external pressure to end prematurely. Judge reaches the end of their shift and goes home, but the game continues in front of empty paler. When the score is still bound after the bottom of the ninth, the plans for drinks are scrapped after the game in favor of extra rounds. When the last tears of sunlight disappear, everyone pulls their car up to the field and turns on the headlights. More than a few men openly wonder why they care about playing when darkness has removed the game with any actual meaning. No one can formulate a good reason, but they are not about to end a chapter in their lives on such an anti -limactic note. The answer that wins the day is “we have to end just to say we did.”
Almost too big to even be regarded as an ensemble movie, “Eephus” plays as a huge tableau on how this recreational has shaped several generations of men. Lund introduces us to two dozen players of different ages and ethnicities spread across the two teams, but none of the individual characters are particularly memorable on their own terms. It is not a prosecution against someone’s writing or acting, but a reality required by the film’s larger point: these men show only those parts of themselves that they take with them to the field, and years of playing baseball together have formed their little Plato into a coherent social organism with their own language, jokes and rules for both the spoken and the different variations.
That is why the loss of this specific baseball in this specific field feels so deeply tragic to everyone. More than just giving up a favorite hobby, each man says goodbye to a version of himself that is only in context. Throughout the movie, several suggestions for alternative activities are swung to fill the newly found void quickly. Nobody wants to play in the other baseball two cities over because the unit is too long and the field is too close to a septic tank. No one even cares to offer a reason why they do not want to meet in a bar during the winter months, but the idea fizzles out in seconds. Although the bodies and names were the same, the men who would appear in any other environment would not be the same who have played in this area for 20 years.
A lot of ink has been spilled over the loneliness epidemic that plagues American men in the 2000s, but few films crystallize the problem as effectively as “Eephus.” During all the jokes that men do not have enough friends or put their social lives to their wives, the truth is that adults rarely meet for the great purpose of meeting. We meet do things. Whether it is a bowling or a church group or a running club or a PTA meeting, the importance of actual activity is often secondary to the social ties that it facilitates. But that phenomenon is difficult to identify until you have spent several years doing the activity. No one in “Eephus” has read enough Robert D. Putnam or Alexis de Tocqueville to explain it, but at some level they all know it.
One of the most admirable artistic choices that “eephus” makes is the decision not to blame anyone for the social decay that it depicts. The field is destroyed to build a school, not a parking monsorship or shopping center owned by an evil company. An impartial observer can even conclude that the education of children is a better use of this country than giving adult men a space to hammer together. The film’s only villain is the passage of time, and its main characters simply face the unpleasant insight that their era ends until their life. It is fate that awaits most of us in one or another capacity, but no one wants to think about it. So we play the extra rounds in Pitch Darkness, just to say we did.
Rating: A-
“Eephus” premiered at the Film Festival 2024. Music Box films distributed “Eephus” March 7, 2025.
