Bull Durham




Cute? Baby ducks are cute, I hate cute!

Sex and baseball go together, apparently.

The Durham Bulls are a single A baseball team with a perpetual reputation for losing. That begins to change when "Crash" Davis (Kevin Costner) is sent down from the triple A leagues. He's not too happy to be demoted merely to get a rookie ready for the majors, but he loves baseball enough that it's better than nothing. That rookie happens to be "Nuke" LaLoosh (Tim Robbins), a wild and not too bright kid with a wild cannon for an arm. Meanwhile, Annie (Susan Sarandon), a woman who has an affair with one player per season to hone their talent, sets her sights on both guys, which sets up for an odd love triangle.

Well, love doesn't really have much to do with this romance, or really anything to do with it at all. Love just happens to be that random chemical feeling that creates angsty problems until you find your happy ending; theoretically, it also leads to better sex. Bull Durham does have an offbeat quirkiness that defies being categorized as just merely offbeat, and it goes down smooth as good wine. That is, it goes down smooth when it's not spouting scraps of philosophy or bad religion, mostly in the form of Annie. When Bull Durham isn't trying to pretend that it's a mindless comedy, it works. There is also some love of the game to be had, and all the baseball details are spot on. But this is not a serious movie, or even one where we care what happens to the characters, because this is foremost a raucous comedy. And at times it is hilarious, not necessarily in a laugh out loud kind of hilarious, but a kind of hilarious nonetheless. And not so much in the marginally crazy things that happen, but mostly in the witty (when it's not trying to be intelligent) dialogue, often muttered under someone's breath while they're on the mound or behind the plate.

This movie, along with The Untouchables, was the one that really helped establish Kevin Costner as a star. And even though his performance as "Crash" isn't really anything spectacular, he brings a genuine kind of weariness and credibility to the aging catcher. He even makes his monologues kind of cool. Well, that's not too hard when he's competing with Susan Sarandon's Annie. Annoying isn't all that much of an overstatement for her, and no matter what your opinion happens to be of her mating habits, she's hopelessly shallow, because she tries so hard not to be, if for nothing else. And then there's Tim Robbins, whose immature "Nuke" isn't all that memorable either, but he's got a lot of charm and easily makes for the most fun of the three.

Bull Durham is like something Robert Altman would direct, except without the biting edge underneath it all, which takes away any excuse for Durham's childishness. But it does comedy; it does comedy fairly well.



-The Gnome