Bull Durham

Rating: Null/10 (11 November 2012)

Tim Robbins plays Ebby Calvin "Nuke" LaLoosh, the newest promising young minor league pitcher for the Durham Bulls. Nuke has been blessed with a "million dollar" major league arm, but he can't control his talent with his "five cent head." Enter Crash Davis, the smart, seasoned catcher, hired by the Bulls to take Nuke under his wing and turn him into a winner. This is Kevin Costner's best performance, and Crash is his best-fitting role. Also enter Annie Savoy, expertly played by Susan Sarandon, the Durham Bulls' unofficial tutor. Baseball is her religion, but sex is her favorite pastime. Each season, she picks a different Bull to train and seduce, and this year, it's between Nuke and Crash. Since Crash refuses her crass offer, Nuke is her man. But Crash has made an impression that lasts and builds for the rest of the movie, and we know from the outset, as do Crash and Annie, that if they were to get together, it would turn into something real. Nuke is the pivot point of this love triangle, as well as the target of both Annie's and Crash's didactic objectives. As Crash and Annie take turns giving lessons to Nuke, their appreciation for each other's experience, wisdom, and baseball knowledge grows (as does the sexual tension between them), until Annie lets her personal needs interfere with Nuke's training, as she mistakenly believes Crash has done the same. Genuinely funnier than Major League, more authentic than The Natural, and more coherent than Field of Dreams, Bull Durham is the truest baseball movie, perhaps because it takes place in the minor leagues, where thousands of hopefuls struggle and play for peanuts, for a chance at a dream, and for the love of the game. Like the game itself, the career of a baseball player includes a lot of waiting. Most never get the call. Many who do, like Crash, who spent 21 days in "the show" (the majors), don't last. And fewer still become stars. And, as Crash explains to Nuke, it's a game of inches, a matter of a few dying quails that makes the difference between playing in Yankee Stadium and selling Kenmore appliances at Sears. Nuke gets called up, because he has talent (and a couple of fine trainers), and Crash, who has brains, loses his position on the Bulls' roster. Bull Durham celebrates the exciting possibilities of Spring, as it laments the knowing stillness of Winter. Ron Shelton, who wrote and directed Bull Durham, conveys well the isolation of baseball players at game time, as they talk to themselves on the mound and at the plate, as well as the isolation of lonely women trying to find fulfillment through sex, marriage, philosophy, and America's pastime. The climax of the movie is a climax (or several), as two lonely souls come together in a shared realization that although they are beyond their primes, they can still choose to dance the night away.