Two recreational baseball teams, the River Dogs and Adler’s Paint, have been meeting on their New England field on Sunday afternoons for longer than anyone can remember. These middle-aged sportsmen can’t run as fast as they used to or connect as reliably with a pitch, but their vigorous appetite for socializing, squabbling and busting chops remains undiminished. After the know-nothing county board opts to raze the baseball diamond to make way for a school, the teams meet for one final game at their beloved Soldier’s Field, with girlfriends, kids and local hooligans as intermittent spectators. As day turns to night and innings bleed together, the players face the uncertainty of a new era. Lovingly laid in a vanished Massachusetts of the mid-1990s, Carson Lund’s poignant feature debut plays like a lazy afternoon, perfectly attuned to the rhythms of America’s eternal pastime. Named for a rarely-deployed curveball, Eephus is both a ribald comedy for the baseball connoisseur and a movie for anyone who’s ever lamented their community slipping away.
See also: Weekend Classics: Batter Up!
“If the perfect sports movie illuminates the fundamentals that make one fall in love with the game, there may be no better movie about baseball than Carson Lund’s EEPHUS…. By subverting tropes of the standard sports movie…Lund has crafted something far more singularly compelling.” —Jordan Raup, Film Stage “Its pearls of practical wisdom and jewels of melancholic wit make EEPHUS a gem, which is fitting, for a movie about a game played on a diamond.” —Jessica Kiang, Variety “Easily one of the best films I’ve ever seen about baseball (even as the sport here could stand in for any number of cultural traditions waning into memory), EEPHUS has about it a mournful, lightly absurd poetry of the mundane, a rapt attention to the intimacy of transience and the meanings we make from relics and rituals of a time we’re passing through.” —Isaac Feldberg, rogerebert.com
