By Steve Erickson

Eephus could’ve become a piece of conservative-leaning nostalgia but, to its credit, it refrains from making small-town sports great again.

Eephus, directed by Carson Lund. Screening at the Somerville Theatre beginning March 14.

A scene from Eephus

Eephus is an all-American elegy: call it “The Last Baseball Game.” Set in New Hampshire during a contest between two amateur baseball teams (filming was done in Douglas, Massachusetts), the sports event becomes a compelling chronicle of aging and change, and not all of it positive. The film’s depth of feeling might not be evident if you just read the script. On the surface, the drama appears to be playing for very low stakes. Director Carson Lund pointedly avoids mainstream American cinema’s habit of building a story around a central character and their conflicts. Instead, he is out to sketch the relationships among a community of men. Along with that, Eephus is also about winning and losing — it is a sad lament for the demise of the value of finishing third place.

The great documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman is the first voice heard in Eephus. He never appears on screen, delivering a voice-over as radio announcer Branch Moreland. He warns Douglas residents about the danger of coyotes attacking their dogs, then informs them that the baseball field will soon be paved for conversion into a school. Two local teams, Adler’s Paint and the Riverdogs, gather for their final game. There are few major events. Pitcher Ed (Keith Richard Williams) has to leave the game to attend a christening. The game goes into overtime, running from the afternoon into evening, so the field must be illuminated by the headlights of cars who are asked to move closer to the action. No one wants to leave, even though they don’t come out and say it. The game concludes with fireworks — which the director refrains from showing.

Written by Lund, Nate Fisher, and Michael Basta, the dialogue rings strangely. In fact, in a few places it sounds as if the men are speaking a string of non sequiturs. Most of the time, Lund does not focus on the game itself in Eephus. It is the background noise that interests him, its broad range of behavior: a boy sneaking a cigarette near the woods, teenagers observing baseball skeptically, the owner of a pizza truck declaring his intention to retire and go on the road. Rarely does anyone talk about anything of particular importance or fill out his character’s backstory. There’s one major exception: a man who lists a series of life events, saying “that’s conflict.” He concludes by saying that visiting his dying grandmother in the hospital is about love, not conflict.

Keith William Richards in a scene from Eephus.

Eephus recreates the ’90s without overdoing the period trappings. No one mentions Bill Clinton or Kurt Cobain. The main takeaway is that this is a time before corporate dominance, when capitalism was local and small-scale. Regional business owners read their own ads over the radio; they market their services without any professional slickness. We never hear any commercials for big businesses. Faintly in the background, the radio plays music written and performed for the film in a variety of styles.

Eephus draws on Robert Altman’s penchant for constructing his films around a group of people — to the point that it barely qualifies as a narrative film. Yet it doesn’t feel like an experimental work — it’s too grounded in small-town American life. Its characters wouldn’t know who the American independent filmmaker and educator James Benning is, but they typify the way he treasures the prosaic. Still, there’s a political dimension to the avoidance of conventional feature structure and its empathy for its characters’ sagging bellies and unkempt hair. The movie was cast with an eye for middle-aged men’s real faces and bodies, not the Hollywood version. Women are almost entirely absent from Eephus, but where they are concerned, the story presents a fairly benign version of masculinity, without “locker room talk.” That said, despite the ’90s setting, it’s hard to watch Eephus without thinking of current discourse about American men’s loneliness. Decades ago, the isolation had begun to set in, at least on the edges.

By the end, one notices that these men can’t talk about the things that matter most to them. Will these teams’ members find another way to spend their weekends with each other? Or will they end up trapped in their homes alone, glued to the TV? What do they think about their aging bodies and their testament to mortality? Restricting the dialogue to small talk turns the bigger picture, especially the value of friendship, into a kind of resonant negative zone.

Eephus could’ve become a piece of conservative-leaning nostalgia but, to its credit, it refrains from making small-town sports great again. The degree of repression its characters live with is unhealthy. Once it becomes dark, the film’s tone grows more anxious. A baseball is somehow swallowed up by the sky. (Throughout, Lund leans on the sound design to make dramatic points — he only chooses necessary images.) The camera often films the field from a distant perspective, popping up unexpected juxtapositions via editing. These juxtapositions reflect an unspoken melancholy. The closing credits reach beyond the ’90s, with Tom Waits’s 1973 “Ol’ 55” playing under them. It underlines the paradox at the heart of Eephus. The song’s lyrics dream about escaping the future, a desire that proves both evergreen and impossible to achieve.

Steve Erickson writes about film and music for Gay City News, Slant Magazine, the Nashville Scene, Trouser Press, and other outlets. He also produces electronic music under the tag callinamagician. His latest album, Bells and Whistles, was released in January 2024, and is available to stream here.