America’s Pastime

I’ve been waiting for my generation’s American Graffiti or Dazed and Confused for most of my adult life. Given millennials’ obsessive attention to nostalgia, the absence of the throwback smalltown teen hangout dramady with its youthful exuberance and sense of naive optimism is particularly odd. But 9/11, Katrina, and the Great Recession left nothing we could revisit because we never stopped grappling with their fallout. 

For most of the decade, we’ve rested on our preschool laurels forged from the detritus of Hasbro toys and Spielberg VHS tapes—striving for a return to an Edenic childhood propped up by Reaganism and the Clintonian fiscal responsibility. Millennial filmmakers may be the first generation to avoid mining our adolescent past, but with his directorial debut, Eephus, Carson Lund has done something that even those aforementioned storied classics never dared: probe the moments when we can no longer use the past as a crutch while mourning the lives we must all leave behind.

Named after the old-school trick pitch when a pitcher lobs the ball to the plate to throw off the batter, Eephus spans a mid-autumnal Sunday at a public baseball field in Douglas, MA, as the largely over-the-hill members of rec league rivals The Riverdogs and Adler’s Paint meet for one final game.

Thanks to the grand wisdom of the town council, their beloved field is set for demolition to make way for a new school. Of course, no one asked these guys where they stood because they definitely reside outside the inner circle of the local yokel movers and shakers. They had dreams that just didn’t pan out. They’ve spent their entire lives within the parameters of this otherwise idyllic New England town. But, on the mound and in the batter’s box, they can become who they’ve always wanted to be for a fleeting moment. Now, that time is coming to an end as the sun fades from the diamond.

In lesser hands, the provincial misfits who make up the Eephus ensemble would serve as little more than the butts of jokes—objects of scorn for those who had the sense to escape this suburban hellscape and rise up the ranks in a more cosmopolitan locale. But, for the New England-rasied, Los-Angeles-based Lund, the film is largely about learning to respect one’s origins no matter how quaint.

“Where I live now is so much different from where I grew up. I've found that I want to go back to that original feeling,” Lund told The Pamphleteer. “It feels like it's the root of my identity. It’s the truest part of myself. I think all those years when I was trying to escape that suburb through filmmaking, even if it was just down the street in the downtown area, I was evading something.”

Lund’s attention to self-reflection not only endows Eephus with a generosity toward its band of misfits but also a sense of carefully-cultivated regionalism that is especially refreshing as the country’s political realignment increasingly pits the smalltown proles against the more urbane elites filling out downtown corridors and cushy ex-burbs. Such is not to say that Eephus is not a political film, but that its concerns have grave implications for traditionalists and progressive crusaders alike. While the movie never makes clunky gestures toward finding common ground, it does use baseball as a great uniter that has also had an outsized influence on Lund’s life and career.

“I was trying to figure out what my first feature would be, and bending over backwards, trying to imagine the narrative scenarios. And, eventually, I just realized I should just go back to what feels closest to my identity, which is the game of baseball,” Lund said. “I've had a shifting relationship to it throughout my life, because, as a kid, it was my whole life. And then I abandoned it in favor of filmmaking, and came back to it later as an adult, playing in a rec league.”

Lund’s personal stake in the region and intimate knowledge of the game also allows Eephus to follow its own pace. As morning light gives way to night, the sense that this space and the camaraderie it has spawned are slipping away becomes all the more potent. Structured around the leisurely timeframe of a typical game rather than manufactured plot beats, the film becomes a tone poem, its mix of sincere comedy and melancholy all the more affecting.

“We wanted to obey the rules of baseball. So as we were writing a script, we were also writing a box score,” Lund said. “We started with the box score to figure out how we're going to spend all these units of time that mark a baseball game, all the outs and the innings. Where is our attention? It was a challenge and an experiment to figure out how to tell a human story and tell a collective story that really isn't something you think of as a Hollywood screenwriting structure.”

While Eephus is a decisively independent film, it is the all-to-rare example of the genre that has as much appeal for arthouse dwellers and the target audience for direct-to-streaming geezer teasers. Those who obsess over every development of spring training will find themselves in the movie as much as those who have never set foot on home plate.

“Baseball is going to create its own flow, and there's no clock. A game could go on forever,” Lund said. “So, it has this romantic sense of  defeating time or defeating noise and distraction in modern life. I think that's what makes me feel romantic about it, and why I think it’s a potent metaphor to go back to in the time of hyper speed culture.”

Eephus opens today at The Belcourt with a 7:15 p.m. screening featuring a Q&A with co-writer Nate Fisher. The Belcourt’s ongoing Batter Up! Series of classic baseball movies in honor of the film’s release continues through this weekend.