Carson Lund
By Carter Neuschafer
February 23, 2025
Carson Lund's directorial debut "Eephus" is an ode to New England, recreational baseball, and slow cinema. It was only fitting that I saw the movie at the Harvard Film Archive, where Lund was patron to and then wrote for in his college days. The introduction and post-film conversation were an interesting dive into the inspirations and memory of Lund's production.
Lund cites his adoration of "slow cinema" masters such as Nathaniel Dorsky, Tsai Ming-Liang, and Frederick Wiseman (who delivers a cameo in the film). And it is a categorizable effort of slow cinema in many ways. The time seems to pass coplanar with the viewer, even though the baseball game that centers "Eephus" lasts hours on end. We are reminded by the passage of time by the clocktower, the boombox radio, and the day that turns to night. Our old and aging characters can't escape the passage of time. This is the last game on Soldier Field before it is demolished and replaced with a soccer field. They play until it's too dark to see. When the game ends, they have to go back to their lives. So the sprawling nature of the film is intertwined with the slow poetry of baseball. Lund said he feels box score sheets are "morse-code poetry", and my father related that to the "visual poetry" of a baseball game. The lack of defined rhythm but the pace of thinking, pitching, cracking, catching is one that Lund based the structure of the edit on. He explained that "Goodbye, Dragon Inn" and "The Tall T" were very formative to the creation of "Eephus", but he was inspired most of all by the format of a baseball game. The film takes place in the time it takes to play 9 innings, bookended by scorekeeper Franny (inspired by an eccentric local baseball fan who passed away as Lund was editing the film) emerging from and retreating to the woods with his chair and fold-out table. He was compared in the interview to a ghost, with his wise and fleeting nature, but the entire film is filled with ghosts. Time passes by the stagnant field, unflinching and unrelenting. It is like "Field of Dreams" in that way, with the players essentially vanishing outside of Soldier Field. They are passed their prime, disappearing into their families and white collar jobs after the ninth inning. Or maybe they are real ghosts, haunting an abandoned park, playing like they did when they lived. We are watching the story that the kids will tell of their parents, predecessors, and professors. This is the tragedy, to outlive your legacy.
Slow cinema is now a young man's game. Youth soccer teams take over the baseball field of the old and experienced. I have to wonder if Carson Lund aligns himself more with harmless kids who inherit the old men's sport or with the lost and losing generation, their ways being washed away with the sands of time. He relates both contemporary humor and refined slow cinema techniques. The film can't hold back from snappy dialogue and punchy one-liners, which, with the arrival and departure of characters at random, inject it with a sense of motion. So it holds back from full commitment to slow cinema, but it is the most inspired work of commercial cinema I've seen since Megalopolis. The eephus pitch is a metaphor for slow cinema, life, or maybe baseball, as pointed out by Conner Marx's character Cooper. The eephus pitch is a very slow and high curveball that catches the batter off guard, and quickly falls before he can react. That is much like baseball, watching, wating for something to happen, and once you drop your focus all of a sudden the bases are loaded. The game at Soldier Field seems to build up for the first hour for a dramatic finale, but as the sun sets and we lose our sight with the players, the tension of the game is broken and the ending doesn't matter anymore. As we begin the final stretch, the players are tense but the game has lost its rigidity with the umpire and "fans" leaving. The ending comes and goes with a whimper, even the fireworks that have been discussed throughout the runtime are unvailed with a melancholy reaction shot. The structure of the film giving out after the leader leaves with Wayne Diamond's character is emblematic of the eephus' disorienting fall. That is the game we played as a kid, says Lund. Just keep hitting until it's too dark yo see first base, until you hear the dinner bell. Keep playing after the umpire goes home and your parents leave. You and your friends hold those moments while the sun sets to a higher standard, necessary to finish before it's too late. Before you know it, it's already too late, your friends have all gone and you stumble back to your house. As a kid, you can come back tomorrow, play until sunset again. Soldier's field doesn't get that luxury.
A less confident filmmaker would have the construction of a new strip mall or military base replace Soldier Field. Lund makes the conscious (and smart) decision to have the rival of the baseball players be younger soccer players. To have the true enemy of "Eephus" be the military or a cartoonishly evil deforestation company would detract from the scale and whimsical nature. The childlike nemesis of baseball and soccer places the passage of time in the villain role. And time is the enemy, in many ways, but it is also a constant, with quite the sense of humor.
"It gets late early out there" - Yogi Berra
