Michelle Erica Green wrote this review which first ran over on Green Man Review.
Bull Durham, the first of Kevin Costner’s triptych of men-and-baseball movies, has characters and icons of a very different sort, yet they also draw on the myths of the sport. Costner plays Crash Davis, a veteran minor league catcher who is ordered to smooth the rough edges of rising star pitcher Nuke LaLoosh. Early in their summer with the Durham Bulls, longtime team groupie Annie Savoy contemplates an affair with one man or the other, assuring them both that no man sleeping with her has ever had less than a stellar season.
Crash takes himself out of the running, proclaiming that he doesn’t believe in such manipulation. He believes, among other things, in the soul, the small of a woman’s back, the hanging curve ball, that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, that there should be a Constitutional amendment outlawing Astroturf, and in “long, slow, deep, soft, wet kisses that last three days.” Naturally Annie is smitten, but she commits herself to Nuke, convincing him that listening to poetry in bed and wearing women’s underwear when he pitches will help his concentration.
To Crash, the way Nuke pays more attention to cars, girls and money than to the sport is a heresy — his problem isn’t that Nuke doesn’t respect himself but that Nuke doesn’t respect the game. The two elders initiate the rookie into the Church of Baseball, as Annie calls her religion: “I’ve worshipped Buddha, Allah, Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, trees, mushrooms, and Isadora Duncan,” she explains ruefully. Crash, the devoted disciple, has been rewarded for his belief with a mere 21 days in the big show. But faith and baseball are bigger than any one man. As Nuke moves up in the sports world and Crash moves on, they both experience the pure joy of being in the game.
Tim Robbins’ rough, sometimes animalistic Nuke more than meets his match in Susan Sarandon’s wistful, passionate Annie, but this is Costner’s movie. He loves the sport with a purity unmatched even by the woman who loves the players; he understands that if the sport demands celibacy, continence, the sacrifice of ego, then that’s what a player owes. In the end he allows himself to share his heart with Annie as well as baseball, but it’s sort of like marrying a missionary; they both know their first passions and their first obligations. Unlike many sports movies where boys have to prove that they’ve become men by giving up their baseball dreams, Bull Durham insists that boys become better men if they keep the faith.
( Orion Pictures, 1998)
Comments