Review: Eephus (2024)

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Carson Lund’s Eephus is a cinematic elegy for baseball and perhaps for a period of American life that no longer exists. It’s slow, deliberate, deceptively loose in its action on screen, but precise in its visual construction. It’s seemingly about nothing, but like a good baseball game itself, more riveting than most American films of recent years. It’s nothing short of a minor miracle, an independent film where form and content are in perfect sync, like a pitcher and catcher in the midst of a no-hitter.

In Eephus, the first and last words spoken by an on-screen character in the film are the same: a quote from The Pride of the Yankees (1942), the Hollywood classic with Gary Cooper as Lou Gehrig, the iconic Yankees slugger who died from ALS, often known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. The fuller quote is key to understanding Eephus as, primarily, a movie about the love of baseball for baseball’s sake: “For the past two weeks you have been reading about a bad break. Yet today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.”

Eephus documents a bad break, albeit one with much lower stakes than Gehrig’s. It’s the 1990s and the local New England baseball diamond, Soldiers Field, is set to be demolished to make way for a school. The two local rec teams, Adler’s Paint and the Riverdogs, play their final game on the field in mid-October, closing out not only the season but also the field’s 100 years plus of baseball history. The movie is the game; that’s it. There’s no plot in Eephus, beyond the balls and strikes of the baseball game, which you know (if you like baseball) provides plenty of narrative tension.

Not that Eephus is a film about tension. Whether Adler’s Paint or the Riverdogs win the game is not important, and the film does nothing to invest us in one team winning over the other. Rather, the game itself is what matters and how it allows these various middle-aged men to escape their ordinary lives and slow down time for several hours on a Sunday afternoon. The film becomes about the specifics of time and space, and how time can seem to stand still and then suddenly rush by in the blink of an eye—like its titular pitch, the eephus.

A key sequence explains the pitch to both the characters and the audience. As one of the benchwarmers on Adler’s Paint learns (along with the viewer), the eephus is a slow, high-arcing curveball that is thrown much slower than a typical curveball so that it completely upsets the timing of the hitter. The idea is that the ball spins so slowly in the air that time seems to stand still so that when it drops into the strike zone, the batter is completely unaware. As the benchwarmer retorts after hearing the explanation: “It's kinda like baseball. I'm looking around for something to happen—poof, the game's over.” As with baseball, so with life.

It’s fitting that cinema is so well-equipped to portray baseball since, like cinema, baseball manipulates time. It’s the only sport where the play is not determined by a clock (even the recent addition of the pitch clock only determines the need to start play, but has no control over how long the play goes). Hence, Eephus manipulates time and space. It portrays a baseball game, but even within its nine innings, the game seems to stretch time as it shows all hours of the mid-fall day.

The filmmaking in Eephus is deceptively complex in order to manipulate time on screen. The semi-real time approach requires a strict visual construction where the lighting instantly lets us know the time of day. In the early innings, the characters are lit by harsh top light from the midday sun above, while the extra innings are portrayed in darkness, where the players use their cars to light the field with their headlights, seeming to create an almost ghostly atmosphere on the diamond. Every inning, every pitch, every putout brings us closer to the end, despite the characters never wanting to let it stop.

The approach to lighting speaks to the film’s slippery approach to reality. It’s realistic as it captures the look of a real fall day, but also creates a bubble in time, where there seems to be no world outside the field and time can freeze or skip forward so long as the game continues. Lund has referenced Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003) as a key influence and Eephus truly shares that film’s ability to create a microcosm of life within its limited setting.

For many viewers, Eephus will be simply too slow and simple to appreciate. Like baseball, the tension and complexity can go unnoticed for people who cannot adjust to its rhythm. But for baseball fans or fans of slow cinema, Eephus is the type of film that captures the ineffable feeling of all that is contained and lost in a crisp fall afternoon, in the slow fall of a pitch, in the passing of a game, a season, a field, and life as we live it.

9 out of 10

Eephus (2024, France/USA)

Directed by Carson Lund; written by Michael Basta, Nate Fisher, and Carson Lund; starring Keith William Richards, Cliff Blake, Ray Hryb, Bill “Spaceman” Lee, Stephen Radochia, David Pridemore, Keith Poulson, John R Smith Jnr., Pete Minkarah, Wayne Diamond, Theodore Bouloukos, Joe Castiglione, Russell J. Gannon, Frederick Wiseman.

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