In Review: 'Mickey 17,' 'Eephus'

Bong Joon Ho returns with an audacious sci-fi satire and baseball season arrives early via a knockabout comedy with an elegiac streak.

Mickey 17
Dir. Bong Joon Ho
137 min.

Bong Joon Ho loves an affable dope. Most of the time, that dope has been played by Song Kang-ho, who starred as a hayseed detective in the slapstick serial killer movie Memories of Murder, a dim-witted snack bar proprietor fighting a sea monster in The Host, and the head of a family of con artists (though to describe them as “artists” is imprecise) in Parasite. Bong has a lowbrow/highbrow sense of humor, which allows him to Trojan horse sociological insight into goofy pratfalls, and he consistently aligns himself with outcasts who are clinging to the bottom rung like Harold Lloyd to the hands of a clock. For a director of such formidable intelligence and weight, Bong has a populist touch that not only speaks to a broad audience but represents them as well. 

For his deliriously offbeat new sci-fi comedy Mickey 17, Bong casts Robert Pattinson as the affable dope and Pattinson commits to the role with audacious silliness, playing a knockabout simpleton who stumbles his way into an intergalactic class war. The level of his stupidity is established early on, when it’s revealed that Mickey Barnes (Pattinson) and his buddy Timo (Steven Yeun) are on the run from a sadistic loan shark after failing to make a fortune in the macaron business, which they were told would be bigger than hamburgers. At this point in the future, Earth has become an even more unlivable shithole, so scores of people are scrambling to join a mission to colonize a snow planet called Nilfheim, particularly supporters of Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo), a Trump-like failed politician with a cult following. 

While Timo has the skill to score a desirable job as a pilot on Nilfheim, poor Mickey is the lone applicant to offer himself as an “Expendable,” a human lab rat who can take on the mission’s most dangerous and often lethal assignments. Through cloning technology too ethically toxic to be accepted on Earth, new versions of Mickey can be printed out of a machine whenever he dies, with his uploaded memories transferred and his personality remaining approximately (but not exactly) the same with each copy. In one expedition on Nilfheim, the 17th version of Mickey falls down a crevasse while trying to capture native space bugs dubbed “creepers” and is assumed dead, triggering Mickey 18 to spill out of the copier. But when he emerges alive, the existence of two Mickeys puts them both in danger, because “multiples” are supposed to be exterminated. 

That’s a complicated series of developments and Bong, working from Edward Ashton’s novel Mickey7, embraces the excess, jamming the film with narrative tributaries like why multiples are disallowed or the sick, relentless obsession of the loan shark who’s after Mickey and Timo. Much like Bong’s other English-language features, Snowpiercer and Okja, Mickey 17 bursts at the seams with expensive setpieces and offbeat science-fiction detail, and the effect can feel exhausting whenever one of his digressions doesn’t quite connect. But most of the time, the film has an irresistible buoyancy that recalls Terry Gilliam’s Brazil in its mix of the dystopian and the zany. Watching poor Mickey die repeatedly from the tinkering of a mostly inept team of scientists can be upsetting, but the running joke of his clones getting kicked out a crude copy machine never fails to get a big laugh. 

With his attempts at social engineering in space, Kenneth Marshall has an “Occupy Mars” quality that fits uncannily into our current political situation, even though Bong could not have predicted such a perfect fusion of Elon Musk’s techbro megalomania, Trump’s nouveau-riche tackiness, and RFK Jr.’s mangled visage. Ruffalo pushes the cartoonishness a bit too far, as does Toni Collette as his Lady Macbeth spouse, who’s amusingly single-minded about turning any organic matter she can find into “sauces” for high-end cuisine. But the film finds a strong comic groove below the deck with Yeun as Mickey’s cheerily duplicitous frenemy and Naomi Ackie as a lusty security agent with a soft spot for Mickey. Yet Mickey 17 turns on Pattinson’s superb everyman turn, which leans on the physical comedy he brought to The Lighthouse but evolves into something more sophisticated when the two Mickey clones diverge in personality. He’s the right hero for a mad, mad, mad, mad world. — Scott Tobias  

Mickey 17 starts confounding audiences in theaters everywhere tonight.

Eephus
Dir. Carson Lund
98 min.

Eephus, the directorial debut of Carson Lund, takes its name from a variation on the curveball described by one of the film’s characters as a pitch so slow it “looks like it stops in mid-air,” making batters “lose track of time.” Then, with a thud, it sneaks past them. There’s an obvious and effective metaphor there that puts Lund’s film in the rich tradition of baseball-as-life movies, but the description has an even more immediate application. An eephus does nothing a pitch is supposed to do as it moves to its own weird rhythm, yet it ends up doing everything right anyway. Lund’s film, which he co-wrote with Nate Fisher and Michael Basta, bears more than a slight resemblance to the pitch from which it takes its name.

Unfolding over one afternoon and early evening in small-town Massachusetts at some indeterminate point in the 1990s, Eephus is as seemingly low-stakes as a film can be, watching as two recreation league teams play out a meaningless end-of-the-season game whose players often seem like they’re present out of some mix of habit and obligation. Absolutely nothing rides on this contest between Adler’s Paint and the Riverdogs. No one cares enough for even bragging rights to be a consideration.

That doesn’t mean that the game doesn’t matter, however. The field both teams have long called home is destined for the wrecking ball, then to be replaced by schoolrooms. And because the next-nearest diamond is an inconvenient drive away (and in a town with some well-known drainage issues), this will likely be the last game most, if not all, of these guys play. They’re overwhelmingly middle-aged. Few have bodies easily described as athletic. They’ve played ball since they were kids but this is their bottom of the ninth.

Eephus lets that sense of finality hum as background noise to a low-key comedy built around an Altman-esque ensemble of colorful characters who drift in and out of the spotlight as they day progresses. It’s nobody’s story in particular. One seemingly central character is yanked out of action by a family obligation mid-film, never to return. Others claim a scene or two to, say, muse on all the different aspects of life that resemble combat. At one point, veteran pitcher (and eephus specialist) Bill “Spaceman” Lee shows up to pitch an inning. Lee’s the closest the film has to a star — unless documentary legend Frederick Wiseman, who reads baseball quotes during the film’s chapter breaks, counts — but getting lost in the banter and years-in-the-making tensions and gestures of affection between these characters is one of the film’s great pleasures. We might just be seeing the end of a long story, but filling in all the blanks leading to this moment isn’t really necessary.

In one sense, nothing really happens in Eephus. No lives get changed. No relationships get shattered or reaffirmed. The game doesn’t build to a big, dramatic climax. But there’s a tattered nobility to both teams grudgingly raging against the dying of the light, literal and otherwise. It’s a hang-out movie that doubles as an elegy for a way of life and those clinging to it until they can cling no more. Nothing hangs in the air forever. Time never really stands still. —Keith Phipps

Eephus opens in select cities tonight before expanding.