Bull Durham

I finally got around to watching Bull Durham last week. I think I put it off for two reasons: 1) it's supposed to be an amazing movie and 2) it's about a place and a team I grew up watching. The mixture of the two just couldn't live up to expectations, I thought. And that famous speech that's supposed to be so amazing ("I believe in . . .") I had seen as a clip and it wasn't that impressive.

Well, that speech still doesn't move me the way it apparently does everyone else. But all the rest of my worries were thoroughly dispelled. Susan Sarandon is the heart of this movie, and she controls both the plot and the screen. Next to Vivian Leigh in Gone with the Wind, this is certainly the best southern woman role -- may be the best female role period -- in the movies (yes, even including Katharine Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor roles). She's smart, powerful, experienced, wise, silly, conflicted, and searching all at once, and it's a joy to watch Sarandon swim around in the depths of her character.

And then there's Tim Robbins, who is so much funnier as the talented but naive rookie than I ever realized he could be, since I mostly know him from The Shawshank Redemption and Mystic River. He's great in a totally different way from either Susan Sarandon or Kevin Costner (who is probably the most predictable and boring character of the three: the wise but frustrated older player -- but Costner does it well, as we all know he can from all those other sports movies he's been in).

Then, there's the plot. I won't go through the plot here, since it's classic enough that plenty of others have done it thoroughly. But I hadn't known before I watched the movie that it was written and directed and produced by men who had actually been minor league baseball players, so there's a fidelity to reality that I hadn't expected. I mean, authenticity isn't exactly what makes sports movies popular. People watch sports movies for the same reason they watch sports: to see their guy win. The only other "authentic" sports movie I can think of is Bad News Bears, which I don't actually like that much for some reason or another. But here, sports isn't about a team winning or losing, it's about a bunch of guys trying to make money and getting girls and prolonging adolescence as much as possible. Though I've never known a minor league baseball player, it seems to me that would be pretty spot on.

Finally, there's Durham. Thank goodness they did it on location. Those dingy brick building, the clay that's practically in the air, the potholes in the roads on the outskirts of Durham -- these details make me homesick, believe it or not, but also lend credence to the size of the characters' world -- the idea of the major leagues does seem like a paradise when you're working in rundown towns with working class spectators, and not too many of them at that. Sounds depressing, but the movies that affect me the most tend to be those that realize that the big dreams of ordinary people are important and inspiring and engrossing, at least to the people who live them.

4 stars.