farm

The sort of high-concept swing nobody risks any more (which is of course a small tragedy). What struck me most was this: do this exact film with football and it’d be insufferable, yet with baseball it’s earnest and earned. The mundanities of another country’s sport arrive here as something close to myth. We don’t have that for football. Partly the game’s class baggage, partly a national suspicion of taking it too seriously, of being caught intellectualising a thing that’s meant to be felt. Costner stands in a cornfield talking to ghosts and it plays straight. Try the equivalent featuring a centre-half on a wet Tuesday in the Championship and you’re looking at something vastly different.

Kaufman’s least immediately legible film, and potentially his most rewarding for it. I didn’t clock how the Jake scenes and the janitor scenes connected until the credits rolled, which may be the point or may just be me being slow—either way, I want to come back to it, just not yet. I suspect a lot more clicks if you’ve got the full reference shelf to hand (David Foster Wallace, Pauline Kael, Wordsworth, A Beautiful Mind, the musicals, etc), rather than catching half like I did. Buckley and Plemons are fantastic, and Collette and Thewlis match them on a fraction of the screen time.