Review of Bull Durham (1988) by Meara L — 15 May 2009

I?m a huge movie buff, and I?m also a pretty big baseball fan, in theory movies about baseball should be the perfect entertainment for me but that usually isn?t the case. Most sports movies are clichéd and not particularly artful, but baseball is a sport that?s particularly prone to schmaltz. With Bull Durham, we see a sports movie that ignores the drama of whether or not the team will win the games and instead focuses on the humorous quirks of the day to day lives of the players. The film looks at a rather poor minor league team that has just acquired a strong but undisciplined pitcher (Tim Robbins) and have brought in a veteran catcher (Kevin Costner) to discipline him.

The film seems very authentic in the minutia of the life of a minor league ball team, Ron Shelton finds a lot of comedy in the lives of these athletes, its also nice that he makes them a bunch of profane jocks, he doesn?t put these guys up on some kind of pedestal.

Shelton clearly knows this world very well, but he doesn?t really know how to make a story out of it. The love triangle between Costner, Robbins, and Sarandon doesn?t really amount to much, and the movie just sort of ends without having been much of a narrative. This is a movie that is enjoyable in the moment, but the sum of its parts don?t really add up to much of a whole.