NEW HAMPSHIRE FILM FESTIVAL – BEST NH FEATURE NARRATIVE
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.
Eephus isn’t exactly a baseball movie — it’s something closer to movie-baseball, where characters endlessly jostle back and forth under no real time constraints, watching the day slowly pass them by, simply out of love for the sport. -Hollywood Reporter
A modest but poignant hangout film that resonates long after the last pitch. -Screen International
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. -Variety
Many a true devotee will tell you that part of the game’s charm lies in its ability to facilitate socialization… Eephus is a film that understands this, and the script shuffles along with the rhythm of a baseball game. -IndieWire
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. -Rogerebert.com
‘NR’ 98min
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