BEFORE: Louisa Krause carries over from "Cryptozoo", and I'm on track with a baseball movie for once, the season just started about two weeks ago, and anything can still happen. The baseball season for any team is kind of like my movie chain, I start every year with a clean record, and from there, it's a series of wins and losses, literally anything can happen during each game, and I never really can tell how the year's going to end. That's how baseball works, right? It's actually been a few years since I've been to a game. I've been close to CitiField when we go to the Brazilian meat restaurant over in Flushing, Queens, but I haven't visited a stadium in quite some time - I don't dare show up at Yankee Stadium wearing Red Sox gear, that's like a suicide move.
THE PLOT: A rookie pitcher undergoes psychotherapy to overcome the yips.
AFTER: I thought the "yips" were a thing in golf, I didn't realize that baseball pitchers got them, too. When we first see Hopper Gibson, he's visiting the team psychiatrist to figure out why he threw wild pitches in a row, and he needs to be calmed down before the playoffs. It takes a while to figure out that his team is the Atlanta Braves, because the film flashes back to show Hopper's recent past as the number one high-school pitching prospect in the country, and he's from Port St. Lucie, Florida, which I know is a baseball town, that's the spring training location of the NY Mets.
Hopper's got a girlfriend, Dorothy, but despite having dinner with her parents, he treats the relationship very casually, he's so flippant with her, it's actually insulting. We get a bit more insight after Hopper's father moves back in with his mother, though we're not sure at first where he's been. Was the relationship on the rocks, or did Hopper Senior have to spend some time at the old Graybar Hotel? As the film soldiers on, it's clear that his father has been abusive to him in the past, and likely will be again - Hopper Senior had a shot at the majors but got caught up in substance abuse, among other problems. So it's not too hard to posit that Hopper Senior is jealous of his son's success, he's mad at the world for his own failure and takes that out on his son.
Hopper Senior had given his son a bunch of rules to live by, some for on the field and some for daily life, and it's possible that those rules have done more harm than good. It's probably how Hopper Junior learned to bury all of his emotions, mistreat women and just be unable to feel or express any kind of joy, not even for baseball. I'd hesitate to call it a breakthrough when the psychiatrist gets him to pitch again after remembering how he threw the ball as a child, before everything got so complicated with fatherly advice, playing to win in order to get that big-league draft money so he could buy his mother a bigger house with a pool. But that's why we all strive and struggle, isn't it? Except the pool thing, I can't swim so that would be pointless.
A random encounter with a female fan at a motel has unexpected results, it's a humbling moment for Hopper, but also one that perhaps shows him that women aren't always the submissive ones, and they all don't exist just for his sexual pleasure. Hey, some lessons are tough to learn, but they have to be. I wish I could have seen a bit more baseball being played here, though - like we never really SEE the wild pitches in question that got Hopper sidelined, and I don't think we ever see him play a full inning of any game. It might be nice to know whether the therapy worked, like did he end up helping out the Braves in the playoffs, or not?
Instead Hopper gets the dirt on his psychologist and ends up calling him on his own B.S., so I guess that means he's going to be OK? Not completely sure, though.
I was willing to wager that this was the only time Paul Giamatti was in a film about baseball, which would be ironic because his father was Bart Giamatti, former MLB commissioner. But no, Paul was also in "The Catcher Was a Spy", which was also about baseball - a bit, anyway.
It turns out this film is at least partially based on the story of Rick Ankiel, a pitcher who had a similar control problem, and had a similarly abusive father. They just had to change the names of the pitcher and the psychiatrist, who in real life was named Harvey Dorfman. That's a great name for a character played by Paul Giamatti, so it's a shame they had to change it to Dr. Mobley. Everything else lines up, though - Ankiel went to Port St. Lucie High, his father was a drug dealer who screamed at Rick's coaches, and when interviewed, Ankiel told reporters that his father was a fisherman. Ankiel found that he couldn't throw strikes any more, and made the transition to playing as an outfielder, but we never learn if Hopper Gibson had the same fate. I'd say that's a rather glaring omission - I mean, the film's under 90 minutes long, but I'd still like to know whether I wasted my time watching it.
It feels like this film was trying to be the "Good Will Hunting" of baseball, but really, in the end, it's just the Brendan Fraser/Albert Brooks film "The Scout", only without the comedy. Which means it might be time to re-watch "The Scout".
Also starring Johnny Simmons (last seen in "Cinema Verite"), Ethan Hawke (last seen in "The Kid" (2019)), Paul Giamatti (last seen in "Gunpowder Milkshake"), Sophie Kennedy Clark (last seen in "The Danish Girl"), Alison Elliott (last seen in "Birth"), Yul Vazquez (last seen in "Nick of Time"), Paul Adelstein (last seen in "Memoirs of a Geisha"), Marin Ireland (last seen in "The Irishman"), Frank Wood (last seen in "Down to You"), Meg Gibson (last seen in "Vox Lux"), Elizabeth Marvel (last seen in "A Most Violent Year"), Emily Fleischer, Journey Smith, Niesha Butler, Aaron Judlowe, John Ventimiglia (last seen in "Human Capital"), Steven Marcus.
RATING: 4 out of 10 ill-advised tattoos
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