But this is not a film about the Sox, nor is it, at least on its face, about anything epic at all. In fact, that MLB team barely comes up at all, though Bill Lee, a.k.a. “Spaceman,” the famous left-handed pitcher who played for Boston in the 1970s, portrays a minor character in the movie. Instead, the drama centers on two recreational baseball teams who’ve met up at Soldier’s Field for the very last game this diamond will see.
In a sly twist on genre convention — the small town folk trying to save a beloved public space because some terrible mean rich guy is going to build a mall on it, or something — the reason Soldier’s Field is going away is that they’re building a school on it. A public school. Its proximity to people’s homes will make life easier for every parent in this town. How dare they, right?
“Eephus” never really foregrounds this in the story. In fact, “Eephus” never foregrounds any particular plot point. The screenplay, written by Lund, Michael Basta and Nate Fisher, exists outside sports movie tropes altogether, though it’s most certainly a baseball movie. It dwells in some languid liminal space between hangout movie and elegy, a tribute to the community institutions that hold us together, that introduce us to one another and that, in an age of optimized life choices and disappearing public spaces, are slowly fading away.
That makes it sound very serious, which “Eephus” is not. The arc is simplicity itself: The teams gather to play the game, which goes much longer than they’d expected and then, at the end, they go home. In between, the men fret, spit, argue, josh around and occasionally hit the ball. They lament the end of their ball-playing era, but whenever someone brings up just playing on the field two towns over, they loudly and flatly refuse: That field’s no good and the town is lousy, too. (Their language is slightly stronger than what I can print here.)
There are some delightful Easter eggs in the film for natives of the region — I chuckled, nostalgically, at the ad for the Ground Round painted onto the fence — but there are some for cinephiles, too. No one character emerges as the protagonist, though certain faces will feel familiar from other small indie films. Yet the most prominent actor, aside from Lee, is never seen: a radio announcer named Branch Moreland, whom we hear early on talking about the field’s closure and other local news, and who offers pearls of wisdom between the movie’s acts, each named for the time of day the game is entering (“Midday,” “Golden Hour”). Moreland, hilariously, is voiced by the documentarian Frederick Wiseman, a Boston native and one of the most prolific and celebrated American directors of all time, but hardly known as an actor.
