XVII. THE PHENOM
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IS THAT NOT THE COOLEST MOVIE POSTER EVER?!?!
Goddamn I want to make love to that movie poster. It’s just beautiful. It tells so much. I have been waiting so long and so hard to review this movie since it came out in June of this year. It just looked like the kind of movie that needed to be made. A dark psychological baseball movie. You don’t hear those words in the same sentence every day.
And The Phenom is a good movie. But it could have been a great movie. And better yet, it could have been an excellent movie, possibly a perfect movie. But unfortunately, it falls short of those latter three distinctions (and we will discuss why below). However, it does do a few things very well.
The story concerns a young, straight-out-of-high-school, professional baseball pitcher, Hopper Gibson, who suddenly has pitch control problems in the majors and is sent down to the minors. There, he starts seeing a psychologist. And this is where we first see him, in the psychologist’s office. Through a series of flashbacks we see Hopper progress from senior year of high school to the pros. We also see one of the main reasons for his success and possibly his problems: his very overbearing father. (You think you had a bad sports dad, just wait.)
The strengths of this movie ride on the direction and the acting performances. First, the young director, Noah Buschel, backs off from over-directing and just lets the camera sit still with the characters. This allows the characters to breathe, grow, and live before our very eyes. Buschel, smartly, lets the characters paint the picture on screen, rather than the director. Second, the acting performances are truly astounding. Johnny Simmons gives a bravado minimalist performance. It’s hard to overstate how good his performance is because he pulls it off without looking like he is trying. So many young actors look like they are trying. Johnny has either been taught well or has a natural gift. How do you play a kid with a tremendous talent and a dark past dominated by an overbearing father? Detached from the world is how. Most young actors would act detached. But, in the film, Johnny is detached. And you see it on the screen. He doesn’t just look like he has been abused, he feels like he has been abused. He doesn’t say a ton, he keeps his head down, and the world seems to revolve around him without his permission. Everyone thinks he is special, except for him. Except for his father’s voice in his head that tells him he is not. He can’t get away from it. And although this haunts him throughout the movie, he is still just a kid. Johnny is able to show us the natural charisma of being a young kid while also simultaneously showing us the maturity of dealing with the pain/abuse he has experienced. We want to look away but we can’t. It is truly a great performance.
(Quick Side Note: Johnny Simmons was originally chosen to play the lead role in the best film of this millennium Whiplash. He plays the drummer in the short film. When they made the full movie, they replaced him with a bigger name, Miles Teller. But Johnny nails the character in the short film. Too bad we didn’t get to see him in the full length feature.)
Ethan Hawke plays his overbearing father. If the movie had been directed differently, Hawke would be getting nominated for Best Supporting Actor (as he did two years ago for Boyhood). He’s that good in this film. Hawke has built a career on sympathetic characters. He superbly and sublimely goes the other way here. At one point he throws a full beer can at his son’s head. His son doesn’t respond like he wants him to, so he makes him do wind sprints in the driveway late at night. Shirt open, tattoos, buzz cut, Hawke as Hopper Sr., isn’t just scary, he’s maliciously transcendent. Meaning, his domineering presence is felt even when he is not there. Like the Godfather’s empty chair in The Godfather II, Hawke’s presence is omnipresent throughout the film, even when he’s not there. The great thing about his performance is that it never feels fake, it never feels over-the-top. It feels grounded and we get to see the character in a few scenes where he is not yelling at his son. One of my favorite scenes in the movie comes when Hopper Sr. is home from jail. He wakes Hopper Jr. up at 3:30 in the morning to go running while he drives the car along side him. Hopper Sr. yells, “Only you, me, and the ghosts of the legends up at this hour!” Hopper Sr. is haunted by his failure to never be a professional ball player, so now he haunts his son.
Paul Giamatti is pitch-perfect (pun intended) as usual. He plays Hopper Jr.’s psychologist who has his own set of issues. His low-speaking, caring, thoughtful psychologist tries to peel back Hopper Jr.’s layers, but the film doesn’t take it as far as we would like it to go.
And so we come to the film’s shortcomings. The menacing trailer for the film, and the first half of the movie are perfect and they set us up to believe something really bad (besides the abuse from the father) has happened in the past. The film just keeps building and building, but then it fizzles. It ends in a very disappointing way. It doesn’t give us the payoff we want and yearn for. We want the final confrontation, either between Hopper Jr. and Hopper Sr. physically, or we want it somehow mentally and emotionally. We don’t get to see Hopper Jr. face his fears/fears of his father on the mound when he is finally called up from the minors. The Phenom is a good film, but it could have been a great film with a climatic ending. A fight between father and son. Or some epic baseball game scenario where Hopper Jr. faces down some batter representing his father.
That would usually be enough for a great film. And it would have made The Phenom a great sports film. But they could have taken it one step further. They could have had what was haunting Hopper Jr. be that he had murdered his father in the past and that, along with the abuse, is what is haunting him. It would have made the film so dark and so good. I’m sure Buschel (who also wrote the film) and the producers thought about this and just thought it would be too much. Too hokey. But honestly it wouldn’t have been. The acting is so good and the directing is so good that it would have worked. It would have been believable. Johnny’s mostly silent Hopper Jr. could have pulled it off and it would have made The Phenom the best movie of the year. Instead, the movie falls short of excellent, and great, and lands on good for failing to deliver in the third act (just like Danny Boyle’s Sunshine did, see post X).
In conclusion, The Phenom is an ok movie that fails to live up to the great potential that its actors, trailer, and first half created. It’s hard to say if you should watch it or not. So I will say this. The movie poster for the film at the top of the article is what it would have been if it had succeeded as a film. The movie poster for the film at the bottom of the article represents what it is now as a film. I’ll let you decide.
The Phenom
Overall Rating: 6.9
Sports Film Rating: 7.4
Just For The Acting Rating: 8.0
What Could Have Been Rating: 10.0
