by Nick Taylor
While all five Breakthrough Director nominees have writer/director credits for their films, only Eephus' Carson Lund can boast additional duties as his own editor, composer, sound designer, and casting director. If he can make three more films in the next eighteen months, America might finally have an answer to South Korea's most multi-hyphenate auteur, Hong Sang-soo...
Yet Lund never makes Eephus into a one-man show, instead spreading his eye to dozens of characters over the course of a day-long amateur baseball game. Set on an unspecified Massachusetts dugout in the approximate ‘90s, we follow the Adler’s Paint and Riverdogs baseball teams as they close out their season with one last game, only a handful of unimpressed local teens and baffled relatives in the stands. In fact, they’re saying goodbye to the whole dugout - the field is set to be demolished to make way for a new school, something only a few men even grumble about under their breath.
With no real villain to marshal against, Eephus is free to be a sprawling, meditative, wholly American study on the passage of time and masculine camaraderie. No one emerges as an outright lead. Instead, every character is allowed to be an entry point into this story, no matter how short their screentime is. These men shine in the sunlight and refract a portion of their souls before the camera. Most of the players are genuinely excited to be here and say goodbye to this sport that’s meant so much to them, though for a few of them, this tilts a little into desperation not to let go. Others have a hard time even articulating why they’re compelled to see the game through as it goes longer and longer.
Lund approaches all of this like a Richard Linklater hangout flick getting high watching Goodbye, Dragon Inn. The most reverence we get for baseball is when we see the eephus pitch itself, a move meant to trick the batter into believing the ball is still in the air when it's coming right down the plate. We spend far more time watching the players cut up on the field or in the dugout than we do actually keeping track of the game, to the point where (not to brag!) I could not tell you the final score of the game. I don’t believe it mattered for most of them. The men’s celebration of baseball and companionship with each other is palpable, all the more so because each one of them knows they will all likely never again be in the same space together. So they play like they always have - discussing their jobs, talking shit to distract the batter, trading philosophical outlooks on the sport they love as it dies before their eyes. Lund isn’t subtle about his American eulogy, but this allows him to dig in and thoroughly explore his themes.
Even when taking Eephus’s openly stated goals as a thoughtful, loosey-goosey hangout into account, I’m not sure the overall sense of time passing plays as fluidly as I’d like. Or is it that Lund’s experiments with dead air and gratuitous delays within scenes has left me thinking the film overall has an issue with pacing, despite very purposefully playing with our patience? Lord knows I'm not opposed to deliberate calibrations of time. Trying to pin down the exact degree of purposeful, observational vibing a movie needs to work feels like the most subjective nonsense critic can possibly do, so take this with a grain of salt. I don’t doubt Lund made Eephus exactly as he intended, though I have more questions about his directorial strategies of playing for time than I do his writing of a very long baseball game.
He and cinematographer Greg Tango find plenty of variations in visualizing the baseball game, knowing when to fill the frame with bodies and when to isolate a player. They even do a good job with the transition from day to night, though I don’t love the flat, hard lighting they use for a lot of the daylight sequences. At least we get some fabulous nighttime photography.
Still, the moment-to-moment pleasures are more than enough to keep Eephus a smart, witty, melancholic tribute to a fading national pastime and the people keeping it alive. Lund’s editing is immaculately precise in how to punctuate and focus a scene, moving each interaction and maneuver forward despite the chill tone, and giving apparent digressions equal importance to the game itself. Eephus also boasts the largest ensemble of finely-etched performances in any film I’ve seen this year. Kevin William Richards and Russell J. Gannon are my favorites, but literally everyone knocks it out of the park without once lunging for the spotlight. You simply couldn’t ask for more from these performers. It's an embarrassment of riches, and if they don't get the Robert Altman Award from the Indie Spirits this year I'm gonna throw something - like a baseball!!
Eephus is currently streaming on Kanopy, and is available to buy or rent on most major platforms. It is nominated for the Best Breakthrough Director Gotham.