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#211 - Bull Durham
Rod Shelton, 1988
Focuses on two players for a minor-league baseball team - one an impulsive rookie pitcher, the other a cynical veteran catcher - and the obsessive fan who tries to start affairs with both of them.
Supposedly, Bull Durham is one of the greatest sports-themed comedies ever made - or at least that's what the hype says. I figured I could look past the fact that it's about baseball, a sport I don't find especially engaging, as long as the plot, characters and humour were solid enough. It's not like its three leads - Kevin Costner as the veteran, Tim Robbins as the rookie, and Susan Sarandon as the fan - haven't turned in amusing performances during their careers either. While I can sort of appreciate how it would have earned its reputation as a minor classic, I ended up finding Bull Durham something of a disappointment.
The concept's got some legs, I guess. Sarandon plays a minor-league fan whose near-religious devotion of the game extends to her beginning a romantic affair with a different player each season, rationalising it as her way of giving players a crash course in life experiences and thus making them into better baseball players as a result. During the current season, she ends up having to choose between Robbins and Costner. Though much of the film is filtered through her viewpoint (she even narrates at specific intervals), not even the many quirks she displays make her all that interesting or engaging as a character. Robbins and Costner, meanwhile, have a prickly relationship of their own as Costner's new job upon transferring to the Durham Bulls is to teach Robbins how to harness his considerable pitching talent. What follows is a fairly stock example of a grouchy mentor using unorthodox methods that gradually sink in with an insolent student. Fortunately, Costner is able to sell his side of the conflict well enough with his trademark apple-pie charisma that's been given an edge by the years of disillusionment that his character has undergone, and he's still got the best lines in the movie (his "I believe..." monologue is probably the high point of the film - and it's about a third of the way into the running time). Robbins, by comparison, doesn't get to do much of note except be the ditzy plaything of both Costner and Sarandon, who both demand a lot from him in different ways.
Beyond the interplay between the three leads, there's not all that much of interest to me here. Baseball humour, I guess, which explains why a lot of this movie sounds so flat to me. Not even a simple gag like Costner instructing Robbins to deliberately pitch at the rival team's mascot got anything out of me. So, yes, I am giving this film a very negative rating, but it's not that I hate it, it's just that it does next to nothing for me. It may very well do a good job at capturing the various colourful characters that congregate in and around the world of minor-league baseball, but that doesn't necessarily mean the end result is an interesting one or even a consistently entertaining one. Not even the bizarre love triangle at the heart of the film does anything except give me the chance to witness Costner's considerable talent being wasted on an extremely mediocre (if not necessarily generic) rom-com plot.
Rod Shelton, 1988
Focuses on two players for a minor-league baseball team - one an impulsive rookie pitcher, the other a cynical veteran catcher - and the obsessive fan who tries to start affairs with both of them.
Supposedly, Bull Durham is one of the greatest sports-themed comedies ever made - or at least that's what the hype says. I figured I could look past the fact that it's about baseball, a sport I don't find especially engaging, as long as the plot, characters and humour were solid enough. It's not like its three leads - Kevin Costner as the veteran, Tim Robbins as the rookie, and Susan Sarandon as the fan - haven't turned in amusing performances during their careers either. While I can sort of appreciate how it would have earned its reputation as a minor classic, I ended up finding Bull Durham something of a disappointment.
The concept's got some legs, I guess. Sarandon plays a minor-league fan whose near-religious devotion of the game extends to her beginning a romantic affair with a different player each season, rationalising it as her way of giving players a crash course in life experiences and thus making them into better baseball players as a result. During the current season, she ends up having to choose between Robbins and Costner. Though much of the film is filtered through her viewpoint (she even narrates at specific intervals), not even the many quirks she displays make her all that interesting or engaging as a character. Robbins and Costner, meanwhile, have a prickly relationship of their own as Costner's new job upon transferring to the Durham Bulls is to teach Robbins how to harness his considerable pitching talent. What follows is a fairly stock example of a grouchy mentor using unorthodox methods that gradually sink in with an insolent student. Fortunately, Costner is able to sell his side of the conflict well enough with his trademark apple-pie charisma that's been given an edge by the years of disillusionment that his character has undergone, and he's still got the best lines in the movie (his "I believe..." monologue is probably the high point of the film - and it's about a third of the way into the running time). Robbins, by comparison, doesn't get to do much of note except be the ditzy plaything of both Costner and Sarandon, who both demand a lot from him in different ways.
Beyond the interplay between the three leads, there's not all that much of interest to me here. Baseball humour, I guess, which explains why a lot of this movie sounds so flat to me. Not even a simple gag like Costner instructing Robbins to deliberately pitch at the rival team's mascot got anything out of me. So, yes, I am giving this film a very negative rating, but it's not that I hate it, it's just that it does next to nothing for me. It may very well do a good job at capturing the various colourful characters that congregate in and around the world of minor-league baseball, but that doesn't necessarily mean the end result is an interesting one or even a consistently entertaining one. Not even the bizarre love triangle at the heart of the film does anything except give me the chance to witness Costner's considerable talent being wasted on an extremely mediocre (if not necessarily generic) rom-com plot.