This is not going to be a normal review. The problem is I've been thinking about it a lot and while I found what I wanted to say, it requires me to do something atypical.
I have written several drafts of this since I saw the film at the first New York Film Festival screening. My "review essentially began when the film ended as I talked with Hubert Vigilla about our feelings about the film. Our initial thoughts were that we liked the first half and then felt it got lost as the day got longer. I wrote another review on the train home and then another on the train to work and yet another at work after talking to people at work and then finally this one.
Ultimately my feeling is that EEPHUS is not a good film. It has some moments but ultimately it is a rather unremarkable and derivative film that doesn't really work. Actually what hung me up is that the film is a bad variation of the sort of sports story that was told to absolute perfection by the film THE LATE GAME about a late night hockey league that came out earlier this year and rocked the house. To say that is something that really shouldn't be done, but the truth is EEPHUS does everything wrong that another film from this year called THE LATE GAME does right.
EEPHUS starts as a low brow comedy about the last baseball game that is going to be played on a field before it becomes the site of a new school. We see everyone arriving and getting ready to play. The film then bobs between the the various characters in a not so much scenes as black outs. As the game drags on the game seems to never end. The humor all but disappears in favor of bittersweet nostalgia. The umpires leave, as do the spectators. The game drags on into the night a the men play the game because they have to. The game ends and....then nothing.
This isn’t a really a narrative film, it more a series of jokes and later, situations that only loosely hang together. There is no real narrative thread here just moments. We are constantly bouncing between characters and situations moving as soon as we get to a punchline or a warm moment. During the post screening Q&A director Carson Lund said that the film was constructed one joke or moment at a time. The result is nothing hangs together.
There are no characters only sketches of ideas of people. Most damningly Lund never ever gives us any sense that either side is a team. Almost nothing happens that make you think that these guys can really play together.- actually he works against it by making jokes at almost every characters' expense. Why are these guys together? Only because Lund put them on the field in similar uniforms.
There is no sense to the game. We see an odd play here and there, but there is no sense of what they are doing on field. I love baseball and I love baseball films, and when you watch a baseball film there is always a sense of the game being played. There is none here.
Lund said that they wrote out the whole game as a box score but we never see it on screen. The game is never really there, there is just an idea of a game, and only the vaguest idea at that. The game should inform the shift from comedy to melancholy but it doesn't happen because we don't concretely know when anything is taking place. The film simply not having a real time frame- the game starts in the morning and ends late at night. The clock is forever chiming three no matter what time it is. It would have worked if the game was said to be in extra innings but the film makes clear its only nine innings. Worse the film references times of day that don't tie together.
I keep wondering if Lund had it all worked out in the script but in cutting the film together he left everything except a few jokes and a stadium full of pretensions on the cutting room floor. Then again I don't think it was ever there because of the way he said he put the script together and because there are all these odd reference to things off screen that go nowhere. For example one of the guys playing apparently responsible for the destruction of the field but it, like other threads, go nowhere.
Ultimately the problem is that Lund doesn't know how to tell this story, he is so focused on getting to the bittersweet ending that he flushed everything that would make it work. Worse Lund's desire to celebrate the game and the people who love it doesn't exist in this film at all. When the game is done so is baseball. No one will travel half an hour to play. Everyone complains about how there will nowhere to play close. Growing up with a father who played professional and semi pro football, ignored his family for dozens of softball leagues, and a brother who loves to play hockey and will travel across the tri-state area to play a game at any time of the day or night, the whiney jerks on screen don't have any love of the game-so the ending falls flat.
And that's where THE LATE GAME comes in. Watching EEPHUS I couldn't stop thinking about this other film. THE LATE GAME is the story of a guy who gave up on hockey who gets sucked into playing a midnight hockey game. By going to play the game he finds the love he lost. While not the same plot of EEPHUS, it has similar themes running through it. It has real characters. It has a real sense not only of the game but a love of the game. You know why these guys are playing at midnight. In EEPHUS you have no clue as to why they even bothered to show up.
(You will forgive me for not going into a deeper discussion of THE LATE GAME, but this isn't a review of that film (This is). What I suggest is you go see it so you'll know how the story should have been told.)
But I'm digressing.
What kills me is that even on it's own terms EEPHUS isn't very good. The first half is a comedy that is funny, but not funny enough. It then stops being funny as it gives way to a pretentious drive to make a contrived and artificial feeling that it telegraphs at the start.
Watching the film I went from being engaged to shaking my head one of the most pretentious films of the New York Film Festival.
In the end this doesn't seem to have been made for film fans or baseball fans. It’s a film that seems to have been made to win awards instead of tickling the heart of fans, either films or baseball. This is a film designed to win the hearts of festival programmers and people who don’t know the game is all about.
No comments:
Post a Comment