Melancholy in the outfield
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A few weeks ago I revisited a childhood favorite with my own kids. Angels in the Outfield came out when I was ten years old and an enthusiastic baseball fan. I must have watched it fifty or sixty times over the next few years, before I aged out of it and the real-life drama of the mid-90s Braves gently edged it out of my imagination.
What I remembered most about Angels in the Outfield was the comedy, the slapstick baseball action, the standard sports movie joys of becoming a team and winning the big game, and the music. (I noticed, though very young, that composer Randy Edelman’s score had a lot of cues suspiciously similar to his work on the previous year’s Gettysburg, one of my favorite soundtracks.) What I was not prepared for upon rewatching it as an adult just how firmly the plot’s foundation was built upon pain, sorrow, and longing.
Roger, the main character, lives in foster care because his mom has died and his dad is a negligent, uncommunicative deadbeat. When the film starts his father has already signed over his rights to his son and has shown up just long enough to tell Roger, a job he performs badly. Is that guilt we see in his eyes, or just awkwardness in performing the unwanted duty of talking to his child? When an oblivious Roger asks when they can “be a family again,” his dad replies with a “when pigs fly” scenario that Roger takes literally. And Roger’s younger friend JP seems bright and happy all the time but collapses into grief when another boy is moved out of the foster home, an emotional response the movie suggests is always ready just below the surface. This is clearly a child struggling with abandonment.
But the vein of sadness runs through the adults, too. California Angels manager George Knox seethes with grievance, not only having had his career cut short when a dirty player slid into him cleats-first, but also becoming a manager only to be saddled with the worst team in the league. The man who injured him, Ranch Wilder, is now the Angels’ radio announcer and loathes the team as well as Knox. His entire demeanor suggests he resents being kept down when he is meant for greater things. And Mel Clark, a former star pitcher who developed a pain pill addiction under Knox’s managership at Cincinnati and who has the film’s clearest redemption arc, is revealed at the end to be only six months away from death. He has lung cancer and doesn’t even know it yet. And so even the longed-for victory in the playoffs is tinged with loss.
I’m not going to pretend that Angels in the Outfield is a great movie or serious drama; it’s simply well and honestly crafted and it treats all of these scenarios seriously. None of it feels forced, none of it is used merely to jerk tears, and none of it is tidily and painlessly resolved. In fact, most of the characters don’t actually get the specific thing they want at the beginning of the film.
This brought to mind two things I had reflected on long ago. The first is an essay from Film School Rejects called “The Melancholy of Don Bluth,” an excellent read on animated films like The Land Before Time, All Dogs Go to Heaven, or An American Tail—all three of which were in constant rotation in the Poss household when I was growing up. Bluth’s movies have a reputation for going to dark places Disney typically balks at, to the point that they’re sometimes the subject of internet memes about “trauma.” Please.
The artistic upshot of Bluth’s willingness to include death and—perhaps more importantly—mourning in his films is a truth and richness often missing from comparable animated films:
Thematically, there is an ever-present air of death about Bluth’s work that is profoundly sad. Bones litter certain set-pieces; illness and age are veritable threats (shout out to Nicodemus’ gnarly skeleton hands); and characters can and do bleed. Critically, Bluth films don’t gloss over grief, they sit with it. From Littlefoot’s straight up depression following the on-screen death of his mom, to Mrs. Brisby’s soft sorrow at finding out the details of her husband’s death. There is a space for mourning in Bluth’s stories that feels extra-narrative, and unpretentious. Critically, this is distinct from, say, wallowing. Bluth’s films have a ridiculously productive attitude towards mourning, most lucidly articulated through Land Before Time’s moral mouthpiece Rooter: “you’ll always miss her, but she’ll always be with you as long as you remember the things she taught you.” Disney meanwhile, tends to treat death as a narrative flourish, or worse, a footnote. And in comparison, even notable exceptions like Bambi and The Lion King seem immaturely timid to let palpable grief linger for longer than a scene, let alone throughout a film’s runtime.
The other thing that came to mind was a podcast conversation on The Sectarian Review concerning Hallmark Christmas movies. At some point during the conversation I drew a comparison between Hallmark romantic comedies and older romcoms by pointing out that films like You’ve Got Mail, as fun and bubbly and appealing as they are, also have vein of genuine pain running through them. Kathleen Kelly takes her mom’s little bookshop up against the big chain store and loses, an event the film doesn’t gloss over and doesn’t paint as some kind of moral victory. Who doesn’t feel the pang of her loss as she closes up shop for the final time and walks away into the night, her mom’s shop doorbell jingling in her hand?
Only Pixar, in older movies like Up and Toy Story 2 and Inside Out, has recently attempted to include such real pain in their stories. By comparison, most of the recent crowd-pleasing PG-13 action fare or animated kids’ movies in theatres or the mass-produced dramas of the Hallmark Channel are pure saccharine—thin, fake, and probably carcinogenic.
I have no firm conclusions to draw on this topic except to note that, for whatever reason, even in our simplest and cheapest stories we’ve lost something important. And if you feel some of this and hope for catharsis, one of the oldest reasons for watching a drama that there is, you’ll have to go to older films for it.
