Most baseball movies are not, per se, about baseball. To take some examples: is about a prodigy overcoming trauma; is about greed and corruption; is a foul-mouthed coming-of-age flick; is all about ; carries the sport into the information age; and (Costner, again) is haunted by the ghosts of baseball past. First-time director Carson Lund clearly had this in mind when he made his feature debut , a movie steeped in nostalgia for the game itself, as well as what it represents for a bunch of men past their prime: the long afternoons in the sun, the trash-talking at the plate, the brewskies in the cooler and the kind of camaraderie you can only find in the dugout.
In many ways, this existential and increasingly surreal indie effort, which seems to be set sometime in the 1980s or 90s, is a in reverse. Instead of building their mythic field, these middle-to-over-aged athletes are squaring off on one that’s about to get torn down and replaced by a school. Meanwhile, just next door to their beloved diamond is a, gulp, soccer field that’s attracting more and more young players.
It’s the end of an era, perhaps the end of America, and one of the charms of Lund’s unabashedly low-fi movie is that this last and totally inconsequential game between a pair of minor-minor-minor league teams never really ends, but rather drags on into extra inning after extra inning, way past sunset and deep into the night. It’s baseball as a means to ward off the inevitable demise we all must face. B.