Delayed Reaction: Eight Men Out

The Pitch: The Black Sox scandal is too big to not have a movie about it.

The story of the 1919 White Sox players who threw the World Series for money.

Baseball has the longest list of classic films among any sport. That's mostly because it's been around as a major sport for the longest. It's the easiest sport to wax nostalgic about. More baseball players and stories have moved into the realm of legend than any other sport. It's America's Game due to seniority, not popularity at this point. I'm not much of a baseball fan, but I get enough of the game and enough of the history to appreciate most of the movies made about it. Eight Men Out might be my limit though.

I haven't seen any John Sayles films before. The way his films are talked about, when I hear his name, the image of a dust-covered trophy room comes to mind. I'm not exactly sure why, but it feels right. Eight Men Out feels very personal to him as a baseball fan to the point that it's isolating if you don't already know the film's story well. The story of the movie happens more than it progresses. There are a lot of scenes and moments that are great if you already know what's going on, but feel unconnected if you don't. It reminded me a lot of when a book gets too faithfully adapted to a movie. Something like A Wrinkle in Time, for example. I didn't get a lot of what was going on in the movie. I noticed that the people who were more positive about it had already read the book. They had some additional context that made the scenes play better. I suspect that Eight Men Out is full of dramatic irony that fans of baseball history get that I don't.

Put more succinctly, Field of Dreams, Major League, A League of Their Own: these are good baseball movies for everyone. Eight Men Out is for baseball fans and baseball historians. And that's a feature, not a bug.

I do want to point out how stacked this cast is. John Cusack, Charlie Sheen, David Stratharn, D.B. Sweeney, Michael Rooker, Christopher Lloyd, John Mahoney. I feel like every five minutes I found myself saying "oh, it's that guy!" No single actor blew me away. Everyone got at least a scene or two to do something good.

Sayles directs the movie with care. I fully believe that this story matters to him. It isn't the most elaborate production design. It holds up pretty well though. I never felt like a scene was in a location that was too modern. If anything, locations maybe were a little bare.

I did like Eight Men Out. The pieces all look like they belong to something I love: great cast, an engaged director, set in a lesser covered period of American history, complicated character motivations. The way it's all edited together isn't concerned with making me love it though.

Verdict (?): Weakly Recommend