Poetic Injustice: Little Big Men

Cody Webster stares into the camera like a man looking across an abyss of time for the soul he left behind. His shirt is as blue as the Atlantic Ocean. His eyes are as deep as the Pacific. His expression is mournful, like a Labrador retriever that’s been whipped with a fireplace poker by an intolerant master. As Webster speaks, the salt-and-pepper bristles of his goatee pierce the air like a thousand needles scraping at the skin of a balloon. All the while, Webster’s shoulders sag as if he spent his youth hunched over beneath the weight of enormous expectations, like Atlas holding up the world, and with good reason: Twenty-eight years ago, when he was 12, Webster was the star of a baseball team trying to win the Little League World Series and rescue the United States from a universal depression that wrapped around this country like a sticky vine. Today, at 40, Webster reminisces about those experiences in Little Big Men, a documentary that’s rife with the kind of overstatement and overwriting that you’ve been subjected to in this paragraph. My apologies.

Through 18 installments, ESPN Films’ “30 for 30” series has ranged from engrossing and artful to interesting yet unremarkable, but it never delivered an outright flop until now. At its best, like when we look into the eyes of a thoughtful Webster, Little Big Men is casually engaging. Alas, at its worst it’s tragic, and in this case that’s the norm. The film is overlong and underfed; it has the skeleton of a story but no meat on its bones. Journalistically speaking, it either buries the lead or fails to detect it. Dramatically speaking, it makes the mistake of trying to be profound when it could have succeeded just by being personal. Cinematically speaking, it’s a crime, which is to say that it isn’t cinematic in the least. Although the straight-ahead, eyes-into-the-camera testimonials of Webster and some of his teammates from Kirkland, Washington’s 1982 Little League team recall the work of Errol Morris, the rest of the film is more akin to Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion. It’s radio, and overly poetic radio at that, with enough pregnant pauses to make William Shatner impatient.

Missing in Action: Jordan Rides the Bus

When the greatest player of a sport retires, it’s memorable. When the greatest player of a sport retires at the height of his athletic abilities so that he can take a stab at another sport he hasn’t played since high school, it’s momentous. And yet somehow Michael Jordan’s one-year fling with professional baseball is practically forgotten, regarded 16 years later like some trivial footnote, like the deleted scene of a classic film, as if it didn’t count. But it did. So, in Jordan Rides the Bus, the latest entry in ESPN Films’ “30 for 30” series, Ron Shelton chronicles the impact of Jordan’s sudden and brief career switch on the NBA, on Nike, on the Birmingham Barons minor league baseball team, on a bus driver, on a real estate agent and on a bar owner. Meanwhile, Shelton charts the evolution of Jordan’s baseball skills, explores theories about the motivations for Jordan’s dalliance with the sport and brings in media talking-heads to reevaluate not just Jordan’s baseball skills but also their own coverage of his brief career. At 50 minutes, Jordan Rides the Bus is a thorough documentary. Alas, it’s as emotionless as a Wikipedia page. Because the one thing Shelton’s documentary doesn’t convey is what all of the above meant to Michael Jordan.

It’s not for lack of effort. Shelton tries. Oh, how he tries! His documentary is heavy with archival Jordan interviews in which the sports icon insists he’s playing baseball to honor his murdered father and because he’s lost his motivation to play basketball, having run out of things to prove after winning three consecutive NBA titles. But these are all sound bites, mostly pulled from press conferences, spoken by an experienced interviewee. They are less revealing of a man in the moment than of a man under the spotlight who is used to the attention. These clips provide no sense of what Jordan thought privately. They provide no sense of what he thinks now. They don’t even provide a sense of what Jordan might have thought semi-recently. In Jordan Rides the Bus we hear a lot of Jordan’s voice thanks to interview and television commercial audio that’s repurposed as voiceover, but since the original sources aren’t cited, it’s hard to put Jordan’s words into context, hard to trust his accounts. Just because Jordan didn’t sit down for an exclusive interview doesn’t mean there should be such a void. After all, Steve James didn’t need an official sitdown with Allen Iverson to give us a glimpse of his subject’s soul in No Crossover. And so it is that Shelton’s film reminds more of two other basketball-related docs in the “30 for 30” series: Without Bias and Guru of Go. Jordan is so distant from this picture, it’s as if he’s dead.

Lesbian Marriages Are Hard, Too: The Kids Are All Right

Paul is a hippie-chic entrepreneur whose aptly named restaurant WYSIWYG (more on that later) serves organic cuisine. Paul is also the father, biologically speaking, of Joni and Laser, the teenage children of longtime lesbian couple Nic and Jules. If the irony of that situation isn’t obvious, let’s spell it out: Paul, the all-natural guy, has helped to harvest a family (through the donation of his sperm) that couldn’t grow without artificial assistance. In another film, this would serve as a Bible-thumping condemnation of gay parenthood in the spirit of that tired protestation that “God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.” But in The Kids Are All Right it’s a nudge to reconsider how families are raised – less through sperm and eggs than through love and togetherness. Nic, Jules, Joni and Laser aren’t an organic family in the scientific sense, but that doesn’t make them any less genuine. Thus it’s only appropriate, not to mention refreshing, that Lisa Cholodenko treats this two-mom family like it sprang from the earth, rather than observing Nic and Jules’ household like some experiment in a Petri dish.

In that respect, the normalcy of The Kids Are All Right is something to celebrate – a welcome liberation from the so many films and TV shows that can’t observe homosexuals without obsessing over their exoticism. Alas, in other situations the familiarity of this family drama is something to bemoan, because all too often The Kids Are All Right blasts right by normalcy in favor of cliché. Given its rather unusual storyline about lesbian wives grappling with the challenges of couplehood and their kids’ sudden curiosity about their sperm-donor daddy, Cholodenko’s film is remarkably predictable – less because it’s faithful to human nature than because it’s slave to convention. (Spoilers ahead.) For example … of course Nic and Jules are polar opposites, one of them a professionally driven anal retentive, the other a big-dreaming but mostly unfruitful free spirit. And of course Paul, the unshaven motorcycle-riding Zen master, is at first a welcome antithesis to parental obsession until eventually, inevitably his lack of discipline and parenting experience sends Joni and Laser back to the bosoms of the moms they have a tendency to take for granted. And of course it’s not enough for Paul to tear at the fabric of Nic and Jules’ family just by entering the picture 18 years after his sperm donation, the plot requires that he actually has to screw one of the moms, too – because how to evoke the struggles of companionship and parenthood without a trite sex triangle? Repeatedly in The Kids Are All Right, what first seems like an attempt to demystify the two-mom family turns out to be lipstick on the pig of hackneyed devices. How unfortunate.

The Conversations: Todd Haynes

After an unusually long layoff due to busy summer schedules, The Conversations is back at The House Next Door! In this edition, Ed Howard and I go film by film through the career of Todd Haynes. This is our first director overview since Quentin Tarantino about this time last year. We were due. Though we couldn't cover every feature of Haynes' oeuvre, we did discuss Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1988), Poison (1991), Dottie Gets Spanked (1993), Safe (1995), Velvet Goldmine (1998), Far From Heaven (2002) and I'm Not There (2007). As usual, it ain't short. So bookmark it, take your time, and join the conversation with your comments.