It’s the last days of baseball. Men gather for their routine game of ball before their beloved ballpark is demolished to make way for a school. Eephus is a slow-burn hangout movie, capturing a single ballgame, as an elegiac metaphor for the passage of time, what gets lost in the forward lurch of chronology, and the generational phasing out of meaningful communal spaces.
Named after a tricky low-velocity pitch, the Eephus, the movie moves like the pitch does. As a player describes it in the dugout, “the Eephus pitch is a type of curveball that is pitched so unnaturally slow that it confuses the batter. He swings too early or too late. You lob it so it looks like a curveball but you give it no power.”
Eephus is a slow-moving ballgame but has these sharpened moments of clarity that cut through like a bat making full contact with a ball. The movie plays a metaphor for the lives of the men who hold this sacred space for one another. It’s strikingly gorgeous and builds and grows on the audience until it offers tender release.
What’s so wonderful about the movie is that, while it’s a pure celebration of baseball, it’s never so stuffy as to feel like anything more than a pickup game. The baseball is not religious, the shared space and the playing of it is. The men never want the game to end. They want to stay on this field forever. And so they play on, late into the night. They pull up their trucks with only the headlights to light the field as the game goes extra innings.
The passage of time begins to feel like an elegiac dreamscape. The final days of this field begin to represent something grander than the space itself, an extended metaphor for the inevitable march of time but also a tender-hearted vision of camaraderie through baseball.
Director Carson Lund captures space and time like a magic trick. Initially, it’s worrying — is this all the movie is going to do? A baseball game, and then what? But that’s the magic, too, it’s a baseball game, and then nothing. There is only the game.
As the innings move forward, we lose players as they’re called back home and even lose our umpire, meanwhile our radio announcer is voiced by legendary Nonagenarian documentary filmmaker Fredrick Wiseman, whose voice is an ethereal specter hanging over the field. The ensemble is gorgeously assembled with regular guys, actors, non-actors, and cameos by former ball players. It’s really a beautiful collection of guys being guys, in a rarely seen capsule of positive masculinity at the movies.
The way the movie describes the Eephus pitch is also just the right review for the movie itself: “It’s kinda like baseball. I’m looking around for something to happen — and poof, the game’s over.”