The Sandlot (1993)

(Another personal addition. You’ll read why.)

Cult films are a funny thing: you next know what’s going to click. Take The Sandlot, for example. I saw it when it came out in the late spring of ’93, and had a pretty ho-hum reaction to it – watered-down Stand By Me, with baseball at its core, and, despite a few charming moments, nothing terribly outstanding.

But within the past decade or so I’ve heard people quoting it and talking about it – it enjoys frequent play at my kids’ child-care service at the gym – and now it seems to have emerged as a modern-day classic. After seeing it again for this blog, my opinion hasn’t changed much, but now I sort of see why such a steadily growing fanbase. It features that “one summer” where a young boy truly lives for the first time (which we’ve seen before), it shows us how that boy, underappreciated by his parents, must turn to his friends for self-actualization (which we’ve seen before), and it remembers a bygone era as the last true moment of innocence, both for its youthful characters and for the country they’ve grown up in (which we’ve seen before).

But there’s a subgenre within the cult film category, and it might help explain The Sandlot’s popularity: cult films that became popular because their audiences were young when they first saw them. Everyone I’ve talked to who’ve sung the film’s praises had one thing in common – they first saw it when they were kids. And then it sort of makes sense – in ’93, nearly in the middle of the cynical, hipper-than-thou Tarantino decade, The Sandlot stood out as an example of sanguine innocence, a retrospective look back at a time when life was simpler, as represented by the purity of baseball. They don’t care that “we’ve seen it before” because they didn’t see it before – its stock characters (the nerd, the gross-out, the jock, the sensitive one) weren’t clichés at all; they were the friends and teammates they went to school with and played ball with.

Now there is a story here, albeit a thin one: an insecure boy and his mom and stepdad move to a middle-American town (oh, I don’t know – Ohio, right?), and the boy needs to get shown the ropes by a more athletic yet understanding boy from the neighborhood. The two soon form a baseball team, and find an abandoned sandlot on which to play. Only one problem – the adjacent lot houses a ratty old junkyard, protected by the mother of all mean ‘ol dogs – an infernal “beast” who, according to legend, eats baseballs, as well as their attendant players, in their entirety. As we move from character-developing vignette to vignette, we get to the “plot” about halfway through: after losing their only ball when it goes over the fence to beast territory, the boy goes back and foolishly uses his stepdad’s Babe Ruth-autographed number. Of course, it goes over the fence too, ad the boys devise a way to get it back. I won’t spoil the ending, but it does involve an appearance by the junkyard owner, played by James Earl Jones (basically reprising his role from Field of Dreams), who all-too-conveniently, happens to be something of a baseball legend himself.

And yes, the boy’s estranged relationship with his stepdad is patched up nicely, as are all the other loose threads. But truth be told, there aren’t many of them. The Sandlot is mostly a patchwork of self-resolving scenes, almost anthology-like, and they’re mostly borrowed from other sources. In addition to the aforementioned Field of Dreams and Stand By Me, the film unabashedly lifts from The Natural, The Wonder Years and just about any exercise in early-60s nostalgia. But unabashedly is the key word – The Sandlot commits its larceny with blithe apathy. It knows what it’s doing, but it just wants to stroll down memory lane. It’s a Normal Rockwell painting of a trousered boy with his bad and glove, heading home after a game. You can almost hear the crickets chirping.

And in the end, that’s what carries the film. How can you rebuke a film whose tone is so lovingly reminiscent? Well, you can try, but it’s sort of like kicking a puppy. And The Sandlot is also smart to not be too polished – it’s got a slightly unrefined look about it that makes it immune to naysayers who complain that it’s a studio product. It’s not, right down to its decision not to hire any child stars for the leads.

So if you’re kid, and you love baseball, this will probably be unchartered waters for you, and you’ll probably love it. The rest, tread with caution. It’s a pleasant film (save for an ill-advised scene of vomiting on a rollercoaster; it didn’t work in Stand By Me either), but not exactly guffaw-inducing.

Oh, wait  - there is one exception, having to do with a boy who fakes drowning so he can be “resuscitated” by the hot bombshell lifeguard. (He can only take so much oiling and rubbing and rubbing and oiling…) That scene is a classic.

The rest gets…

Rating: **1/2