Bull Durham 1988

There are a lot of cliches in this film, a lot of characters who feel very stock and very conventional even as they're meant to be unconventional. Nuke LaLoosh is your standard-issue dumb jock, as cocky as he is clueless, meant to show the slightest bit of growth that eventually makes him lovable. Crash Davis is the usual old hand, wise in the ways of life and his profession and ready to school the nudniks he's surrounded by with his years of wisdom. And then there's a fairly typical collection of motley souls to make up the rest of the baseball team, each with one-note characterizations that make them distinctive enough without detracting from the stars of the show.

And then there's Annie Savoy, a character who I can't quite get my head around, but who feels anything but conventional. The problem becomes whether that's a good thing or a bad thing based on how she's played and portrayed in the film. There's two ways to look at Annie, and I'm not sure which is the most correct or the truest to the character as written and performed.

The first is as a self-assured, self-actualized firecracker of a woman, who's in charge of her own sexuality, has her own journey over the course of the film, and who isn't shy about going after what she wants with abandon. There's a confidence to the character, a sense in which she knows who she is and what she's about and she has no interest in adjusting or apologizing for that.

The second is as a shallow male fantasy of a woman who's as interested in sports as she is in sex, who has a tacked-on interest in literature to attempt to make her seem like something other than curvaceous trophy to be won at the end of the film, and who is only truly happy, who only truly grows as a person, when a big strong man comes along who knows how to tame her.

Having mulled it over since I watched Bull Durham, I still haven't settled on an answer. Is she empowered or an object? Is she a three-dimensional character who's allowed to revel in her own uniqueness or a skin-deep vixen who's more of a narrative device than a person? Whatever the answer to that question, she's distinctive, and one of the few elements that stand out as unique and original in an otherwise fairly basic, cliche-ridden film.

But she has a story and a journey, and that goes a long way. It's a journey that connects her with Crash, and pulls the two of them together once Nuke leaves both of their lives. Their fates, and their existences, are intertwined in Bull Durham. Both of them are grooming Nuke to one degree or another. Both are coaching him up on the game of baseball, but also coaching him through life, through how to conduct himself, for how to think about the game and his part in it. The two have their differences -- mostly when it comes to Nuke's vow of abstinence until his winning streak ends -- but for the most part the pair are in sync.

That's why it makes sense that they would find solace in one another. The two of them lead very different lives, but are in very similar positions. Each knows that they derive their value from being attached to "greatness," or as close to what passes for that on a baseball diamond. Crash is good, but not good enough, so instead of the superstar his mind suggests he could be, his physical skills mean he's always going to be a step behind, only brought in to coddle and mold the Nukes of the world. And Annie is the same way, choosing her "prospect" on the team each season and enjoying a single-serving romance until the inevitable departure. Their fates are each tied to someone else, someone destined to leave, until they're each too old to hack it anymore, even as a springboard for someone much younger and less worldly than they.

There's real pathos there. The subtext to the film, that there's a quiet mix of emptiness and fulfillment in being someone else's stepping stone year after year, a soft ignominy of dubious distinctions like a minor league home run record or the number of faces framed on your wall. If there's anything that makes Annie and Crash work, that makes their coming together feel like a minor triumph instead of the mere inevitable result of an eighties sports comedy, it's the idea that both of them are wasting something on Nuke, that they're being used up and expending the best of their energy and efforts on someone who may never truly appreciate or understand them, while there's someone who would waiting on the other side of the ballpark.

Bull Durham posits Annie and Crash as equals, or at least as equally matched, both knowledgeable and capable and not easily swayed. Each is bending over backwards to try to build someone into something, to teach them not to shake off a signal or how to unsnap a garter. So when their collective protege is sent on to his next stop, never to come back, they're left with each other, and the realization that having been in the same business for a long time, they're each ready to step back and retire from it together, that they want something more than that cycle which brings them tantalizingly close to greatness, but casts them aside and leaves them empty and waiting for the next go-round when it's finished. Rather than trying to build someone for the future, they find love, or at least comfort, in someone who's already fully-formed.

It's just a shame that we have to spend the bulk of the film's runtime steeped in the usual eighties cheesiness to seize on that point. Despite that subtext, the love triangle between Annie, Crash, and Nuke, has all the tropes and narrative conventions you'd expect in a film released from 1988. Tim Robbins' cuts an appropriately doltish figure as the rube who tries to fight his unwitting mentor behind a bar and tries to beg off Annie's poetry for more carnal pursuits. Kevin Costner's Crash speaks in the fortune cookie wisdom and hoary one-liners of a man destined to relive the same basic sports movies over and over again.

There are bright spots. The pow-wow about wedding presents and the manager's riot act are easy but enjoyable gags. But the humor, the side characters, the relationships, and the drama, all reek of the two-tone emotional backdrop and typical story beats that show little imagination despite a solid premise and thematic ballast to prop up both the lighter and more dramatic elements of the film.

And yet, there's Annie, a fascinating character who seems like she's two-parts a vivacious, fully-realized human being who loves and accepts herself and her choices but evolves and finds something deeper, and one-part a prize for her male counterpart to win after he shows her the error of his ways and establishes himself as the one she should be chasing rather than expecting to chase her. I don't know how to resolve those aspects of her character, or whether they make her admirable, retrograde, or something in between. But maybe we all deserve to wear white.