kevin costner

Bull Durham (1988)

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As we’re nearing the midpoint of 2025, I’m making peace with the fact that my favorite new release so far this year is a movie about baseball. The laidback, casually philosophic baseball comedy Eephus finds tremendous thematic & spiritual significance in a sport that I’ve never really had much interest in before but now understand to be a rich cinematic subject. I was charmed by the team-camaraderie story told in A League of Their Own (both the 90s movie and the too-quickly cancelled TV show).  I had an unexpectedly emotional experience with the 90s baseball melodrama Field of Dreams as well, finding it to be a surprisingly affecting story about marriage, faith, and fatherhood – all filtered through the rhythms & spiritualism of baseball. My entire life, I’ve considered baseball to be about as boring of a spectator sport as watching someone assemble a jigsaw puzzle. I get that it’s an interesting strategic game for the players, but visually there’s just not much spectacle to it; it’s like watching competitive chess with the added excitement of … waiting around. All of that empty time spent loitering on the field and over-thinking game theory in the dugout does leave plenty of space for the transcendent poetry of cinema to flourish, though, and so I’m starting to appreciate the appeal of baseball movies these days even while still missing out on the appeal of baseball itself. As a result, it seemed like the perfect time to catch up with another classic example of the genre, the minor-league sex comedy Bull Durham.

Written & directed by former minor-league player Ron Shelton, Bull Durham attempts to provide behind-the-scenes insight to the general baseball-watching public of what it’s like to play for the minors. There are seemingly two career paths for competitive minor-league players, both defined by their relationship with The Major League (referred to in-film simply as “The Show”). Tim Robins is a young player on the upswing: a talented but undisciplined fuckboy who could earn his way into The Majors if he focused on honing his skills instead of bragging about what he’s already achieved. Kevin Costner is his older, wiser counterbalance: a dependable, level-headed player who’s aged out of his physical ability to compete in The Majors but is hopelessly addicted to the ritual of the game. Costner is hired to get Robins’s wildcard hotshot pitcher into shape as his more mature, grounded catcher, entering the scene with a verbatim “I’m too old for this shit” complaint of jaded exhaustion. Their old-timers vs. new blood conflict is quickly supercharged by the intrusion of Robins’s other unofficial sidelines coach: a fellow “too old for this shit” team groupie who sleeps with one promising player every season so she can help mold him into something great. Naturally, Susan Sarandon steals the heart of both men in that part, and the question of whether this will be her final season hangs just as heavily over her head as it does for Costner.

I might not ever fully understand the spiritual power of baseball, but I feel like I’ve intrinsically understood the full sexual dynamism of Susan Sarandon my entire life, so this is likely the most effective gateway to appreciating the sport as I’ll ever find. Sarandon is nuclear hot here, flavoring the cougar seductress role she later filled in White Palace with a thick Southern drawl, recalling Dolly Parton’s sweetly sexy narration track in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. Her pursuit to reshape Robins’s wild horndog energy into something more purposeful & measured takes on a distinct BDSM power dynamic as soon as their first night together. He wants to tear his clothes off and immediately jump into bed, but she makes him slowly strip to really feel his body, then ties him to the bed and reads him classic poetry as foreplay. Later, she convinces him to wear black-lace lingerie under his uniform to help distract from the internal self-doubt monologue that throws off his pitches. When he first meets her, “he fucks like he pitches, all over the place,” but by the time they part she’s almost literally whipped him into shape. Meanwhile, her sexual dynamic with Costner is much more sincere & equitable. When Costner ties her to the same bed, it’s to paint her toenails as a visual substitute for cunnilingus. He’s mature enough to take things slow, all romantic-like, which is an energy Sarandon struggles to adjust to after “coaching” so many jumpy, undisciplined fuckboys over the years.

Bull Durham wastes no time to addressing the spiritual, transcendent aspects of baseball. In her opening narration, Sarandon explains that she has chosen to dedicate her spiritual life to the sport as a direct substitute for religion, musing about how the 108 beads in the Catholic rosary directly correspond to the 108 stitches in a regulation baseball. She’s not the only old-timer in the picture who pontificates about how The Church of Baseball is “the only thing that truly feeds the soul,” either. Whenever Costner gets misty-eyed bragging about his brief time playing in The Majors, he gets lost in the thought that “The ballparks are like cathedrals.” All of the game theory, philosophy, ritual, and superstition that goes into keeping even a mediocre minor-league team on its feet for a season gets away from everyone involved, and the genius of the film is in how it’s connected to Sarandon’s own complex theorizing on the transcendent poetry of casual sex. For his part, Ron Shelton brings all of this spiritual abstraction down to a tangible, real-world level once Costner & Sarandon make peace with their impending retirement. At the climax, Sarandon explains in narration, “Baseball may be a religion full of magic, cosmic truth, and the fundamental ontological riddles of our time, but it’s also a job.” Balancing that working-class practicality with the spiritually fulfilling poetry of the sport is something I’ve seen wrestled with in all of the various baseball movies I’ve been watching lately, so I suppose there’s an undeniable truth to the observation.

-Brandon Ledet

Podcast #162: Field of Dreams (1989) & Dad Movies

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Welcome to Episode #162 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss their dads’ favorite movies, starting with the Kevin Costner baseball fantasy Field of Dreams (1989).

00:00 Welcome

01:40 Crimes of the Future (2022)
08:22 Flux Gourmet (2022)
14:42 Brahms: The Boy II (2020)
19:56 The Shout (1978)

26:26 Field of Dreams (1989)
56:56 Seven Samurai (1954)
1:15:40 Dumb & Dumber (1994)
1:35:25 Tommy Boy (1995)

You can stay up to date with our podcast by subscribing on SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, or TuneIn.

– The Podcast Crew

Hidden Figures (2016)

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fourhalfstar

Although it’s a fairly paint-by-numbers historical pic, Hidden Figures stands out as a moving and impressive film, and the Academy has taken notice: Figures has picked up multiple Oscar nods this year in both behind-the-scenes and before-the-camera categories. This is important for a number of reasons, not least of all that it demonstrates that the #OscarsSoWhite backlash has put the old guard on notice. Additionally, it’s worth noting that the current political climate is anti-science, anti-progress, anti-women, and anti-minority, and while this film doesn’t exactly stand in that gap and hold the door, it does serve as a reminder of how far we’ve come and how far we have left to go.

The film follows the story of three real black women who worked for NASA in the 1950s and 1960s as “computers,” numerical analysts who performed and checked the calculations needed to put satellites into orbit, and later to send the first men into the cold vacuum that lies between the stars and bring them down to earth again. Janelle Monáe plays Mary Jackson, a mathematician who becomes an engineer, alongside Octavia Spencer’s Dorothy Vaughn, who leads the “colored women” computing group as a de facto supervisor despite being denied the prestige, title, and remuneration of that position. The cast is largely led by Empire‘s Taraji P. Henson, who plays Katherine Goble (later Johnson), a mathematical and physics genius who is instrumental in the calculations that are used to launch John Glenn (Glen Powell) into orbit and save him from destruction on re-entry. Rounding out the cast are Kirsten Dunst as Dorothy’s foil, an obstructionist gatekeeper, Jim Parsons as Paul Stafford, the head engineer of the Space Task Group, Kevin Costner as Al Harrison, the director to whom both Stafford and Katherine Goble report, Mahershala Ali as Katherine’s love interest Jim Johnson, and Aldis Hodge (so good to see you, Aldis, I’ve missed you so much since Leverage went off the air) as Mary’s husband Levi.

As with all historical films, it’s not wholly clear how precise Hidden Figures is in its details (I must admit that I haven’t read the book on which the film is based), but that’s largely irrelevant to the film’s message. Does it matter whether or not the real-life Al Harrison took a crowbar to the “Colored Ladies Room” sign and declared that “Here at NASA, we all pee the same color,” after learning that his best mathematician had to run a mile to the only such lavatory on the program’s campus every time she needed to relieve herself? Not really. What matters is showing young people (especially young girls) of color that although barriers exist, they can be surmounted. It also reminds the white audience that is, unfortunately, less likely to seek this film out that the barriers that lie in place for minorities to succeed do exist despite their perception of a lack of said barriers. What Harrison initially perceives as a failure in his subordinate’s work ethic is, in reality, a fact of her existence to which he is blind because of his privilege; in fact, his position of power has rendered him so above and outside of this concern that the fact it exists is a shock to him. It’s not exactly subtle, but when the truth has to still be dropped like an anvil from the sky fifty years after the fact, there’s no room for subtlety.

Characters like Stafford and Vivian Mitchell could easily be construed as caricatures, but Hidden Figures reminds us that this same kind of oppression is still ongoing. Post-bathroom-desegregation, Vivian and Dorothy both emerge from bathroom stalls and Vivian (who at this point has blocked Dorothy from a promotion to supervisor and taken no small satisfaction in the way that the goalposts have been moved for Mary’s transition to engineer) tells Dorothy that she has “nothing against [her] kind,” she just does her job. Dorothy gives her the only answer that she can: “I know . . . that you probably believe that.” It’s a stark reminder that “following orders” to maintain an immoral status quo isn’t just used as self-justification for the enablers and perpetrators of genocide in a distant past, it’s something that happens every day, hindering progress at every half-step.

There’s a lot to parse in this film, straightforward though it may seem, certainly far more than can be contained in this review (and, it goes without saying but I’ll say it anyway, this discourse is limited by the horizons of my privilege as a white cisman), but Hidden Figures gets a strong recommendation from me. Catch it in theaters if you can; and, if you can’t, make sure to rent it somehow to show to your ignorant friends and family next holiday. Just be prepared to admit that maybe it is hard to buy Glen “Chad Radwell” Powell as American hero John Glenn.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond