The memory drama is a favored alternative to superhuman heroics and special- effects nightmares on today’s movie screens. Stealing Home is this summer’s leading entry, an appealing romance that uses baseball merely as a coincidental backdrop.
Authors-directors Steven Kampmann and Will Aldis have wrapped midlife crisis and childhood coming-of-age neatly around a single character played by Mark Harmon. In Stealing Home, he portrays a besotted 38-year-old baseball player forced to put his life in order when forced to deal with his past.
The story is told via a complex series of flashbacks that trace the character’s major influences at age 10, again at 16 and at 38, the latter just six months before “the present.” The transitions are clean and clear, focusing on the man’s emotional progress so there’s never any confusion about the chain of events. Add to that the camera’s soft focus and an almost sepia production design, and Stealing Home exudes all the sentiment of a family album.
Harmon portrays Billy Wyatt, who’s spotted in high school by a scout for the major league’s Philadelphia Phillies and embarks on a promising career shortly after.
Somewhere between then and the moment we meet Wyatt in his late 30s; he’s lost his ambition and drifted out of the game. The incident that sparks the beginning of his comeback is the suicide of a childhood friend, a free- spirited woman who was his first mentor and lover. In her will, she makes him responsible for disposing of her ashes; the dilemma that request presents is the hook for the ballplayer’s self-evaluation.
Harmon is gently appealing as the adult Billy, yet no more so than William McNamara as the same character at 16 or Thatcher Goodwin, making his acting debut, as Billy at 10. The girl who molds their character is played by Jodie Foster, progressing from an impulsive 16-year-old baby sitter and “pal” to, at 22, his emotional and sexual confidante.
The story focuses closest on McNamara as the teen-age Billy; it’s McNamara who gives what may be the film’s most interesting portrayal. Though Harmon and Foster share top billing, the two are never on-screen together.
Nevertheless, Kampmann and Aldis’ screenplay links the two closely and integrates their story far more effectively than the plot would suggest. Even the ridiculous idea of having Harmon spend much of the film wandering around Philadelphia with the girl’s ashes under his arm is treated with finesse.
For the rest, Stealing Home is filled out with stock images of boyhood rites of passage. Young Billy’s escapades are conducted along with an immature childhood friend, played by Jonathan Silverman. These scenes follow formulas that became filmic axioms with Summer of ’42 nearly two decades ago.
The difference, of course, is that Stealing Home doesn’t just use Harmon as a narrator. He’s an active participant whose reflections give him the push he needs to put his life back in order. It’s sentimental stuff but told with enough wit to step lively up to the predictable finale.
Harold Ramis, best known for zaniness in front of and behind the camera, shows a quiet sense of irony as Harmon’s grown-up chum. Blair Brown gives an attractive performance as Billy’s mother, a bright young woman whose spirit is dampened by the death of her husband. That’s John Shea, whose brisk performance as the proud pop gives zest to some early scenes.
STEALING HOME
A washed-up baseball player re-examines his life and rekindles his career.
Credits: With Mark Harmon, Jodie Foster. Written and directed by Steven Kampmann and Will Aldis.
Nudity, profanity.
