Eephus

A town field in New England. Two amateur baseball teams are playing their last game; the field is about to be dug up and a school built on it. All the players are middle aged, none of them are good, everyone is tired and the game drags on. It starts in the afternoon, evening comes, it gets dark, and nobody wants to stop. In the end they play on by the headlights of their cars. Carson Lund directs. The title comes from a kind of pitch: the eephus is thrown very slowly on a high arc to catch the batter out. The film's tempo resembles it. The narrative builds no plot; across the game there are conversations, arguments, sandwich breaks and heckling. The players' lives are visible only inside that talk. The subject is not baseball but something being done for the last time. The closing of the field means the loss of a common space in the town, and the film shows that without saying it. It was made cheaply and most of the cast are not professional actors. It screened in the Directors' Fortnight at the Cannes film festival. Who it is for: viewers who like slow, observational American independent film. Who it is not for: nothing happens, there are many characters, and some passages mean little to a viewer who does not know baseball.