I’ve been doing this thing on Facebook that started off as a 30 day movie challenge meme that has somehow gone on for close to one hundred and forty days by now, where I get a category and name a best movie in that category that I have seen without naming the same movie twice. A recnet one was a best Susan Sarandon movie and…I could not name any I had seen before aside from two I didn’t care for, namely The Rocky Horror Picture Show and the half-assed attempt at noir Twilight,a star-studded movie that was not about sparkly vampires.
But I had time to catch up on something and found Bull Durham on a service I subscribe to. Perhaps that would help.
Annie (Sarandon) is a worshiper in the Church of Baseball (her term). A lover of both poetry and the sport, she explains in her opening voice-over that every season she takes a new lover from the local minor league team, and each of these year-long trysts has a great season on the field. For this year, Annie sees she has two choices for herself: hotshot young Nuke (Tim Robbins), pitcher with a great fastball but poor aim and self-control, and Crash Davis (Kevin Costner), a veteran catcher whose played most of his career in the minors bouncing from team to team. Annie propositions both men at more or less the same time. Crash crankily declines; Nuke jumps at the chance.
What follows is both Annie and Crash trying to teach Nuke how to improve his game and make it ” the big show”. Their advice isn’t always compatible as Annie’s is more romantic/philosophical and ties to the bedroom while Crash’s is more baseball-practical. Nuke isn’t a very bright man under the best of circumstances, and quite frankly, Crash’s general attitude falls in line with more traditional romantic comedies, where at least one party shows complete disdain for the other before they come together in the end. And since that is more or less what happens, well, everything worked out there then.
Now, I wouldn’t call Bull Durham a bad movie by any stretch of the imagination. The three lead performances are good, Costner and Robbins at least are well-cast, and Sarandon’s zen-like seductress works. What is also is is not my sort of movie. I don’t much follow sports, and the sports aspects were somewhat cliched as indeed Nuke made it to the majors by the time the movie ended. As for the comedic aspects, those were fine, but I generally prefer my comedies to be a lot broader. So, while I will be giving the movie a good grade when I evaluate it below, that will be more for my general appreciation for how the movie worked than for my own personal interest in it.
And, well, there’s nothing wrong with the movie. It just isn’t my usual cup o’ tea. It works fine as a romantic comedy and as a romantic comedy. And quite frankly, Robbins plays a good comedic fool. If nothing else, it’s a perfectly fine movie I have no interest in seeing again.
Grade: B+
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