The Sandlot (1993)

(On TV, June 2019) There are no perfect movies, but there can be archetypical movies—films so accurate in their intentions and execution that it’s hard to imagine them being any better than they are. After a belated first viewing, that’s how I feel about The Sandlot: If you were to make a movie about boomers reflecting on the early 1960s through a narrated coming-of-age comedy about baseball, you would probably end up remaking The Sandlot. The story isn’t that complicated, featuring an unathletic kid trying to make friends in his new neighbourhood and discovering a group of boys playing baseball in a nearby abandoned field, with a dangerous dog on the other side of the fence. It certainly helps that the film, at times, echoes other similar movies such as Stand by Me, A Christmas Carol and Field of Dreams: there’s a universality to its execution that finds an echo across a wide audience, focusing on the low stakes so important to early teenagers, and occasionally slipping into fantastical imagination as an impressionistic device. It works even for people with no particular interest in baseball. There are a handful of striking scenes (some of them still influential, as the trailer for Stranger Things season 3 shows), a feel-good ending, some clever character work and a nostalgic atmosphere that comes close to cloying without quite being stuck in it. After a bland beginning, I progressively got into it and was won over by the end. The Sandlot does exactly what it wants, and it does it as well as anyone could have done.