Show me what you’re made of, why don’t ya?
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The Phenom is another film in this series you should watch even if you don’t enjoy baseball.
The story follows Hopper Gibson, a young pitcher wrestling with the impact his abusive father has on his life and his relationship with the game. Writer-director Noah Buschel has created something really special. Combined with powerful performances by Johnny Simmons and Ethan Hawke, as the father and son, the result can be hard to watch. The weight of the contempt and emotional violence is visceral.
I have no idea what sort of research and life experience works at the core Buschel’s script, but his depiction of weathering that sort of abuse is so accurate to reality. It’s clearly rooted in either personal experience, or deep empathy — perhaps both. That’s also true of the performances. Hawke’s portrayal of limitless contempt for his son, contempt that only increases as his son achieves things personally and professionally that escape him, looks exactly how it did in my own life. And on the other side, Simmons perfectly reflected back to me the experience of having to keep your head down and ride out a firestorm of emotional violence once it gets going. You only hope to avoid doing something to escalate it, but often acquiescence itself fuels the rage as it burns hotter and hotter until it elicits a response. You can see in his performance the portrayal of the way trauma can become commonplace. It’s not that it ever stops hurting, it’s just that the pain becomes the expected climate of your life.
It’s always laudable when a film gets the details right when it’s depicting something you have a lot experience with. This is especially true when the subject matter is associated with personal trauma. I’m grateful for this film.
And as a bonus, the baseball is really authentic, too!
Fun fact: The film has a musical theme, but it’s entirely diegetic, i.e. all the music in the film comes from sources within the film. So we hear the theme as organ music at a game, or when someone is whistling, or on the radio.
Up Next: Eight Men Out, the story of eight players given a lifetime ban from baseball for their role in throwing the 1919 World Series.
