Every season, baseball groupie Annie Savoy (Susan Sarandon) selects a new player to sleep with/pass her extensive baseball knowledge on to, and that player goes on to have the best season of their career. This time around her choice is made difficult by there being two potential candidates, naive, cocksure but dim-witted pitcher Ebby Calvin LaLoosh (Tim Robbins) and the seasoned cynical old hand Crash Davis (Kevin Costner) brought in to train him. Robbins sells the level of inexperience and dimwittedness required for his player with “a million dollar arm and a five cent head” but he pales in comparison to Costner and Sarandon, though their characters are far more layered.The focus is on the relationships between these three, both personal and professional, with equal time given over to sporting, romantic and comedic elements, so as long as you like at least one of those three aspects, you’ll find something here as Crash teaches Ebby about foot fungus, interview technique (“I like winning... it’s better than losing”) and the lyrics to Try a Little Tenderness, whilst Annie takes a different approach, coaching him to think differently via her underwear and Walt Whitman.
Whilst the ending isn’t surprising, the journey to get there is enjoyable, realistic and often hilarious, with well rounded characters and situations, but is anyone else concerned about how many candles Annie has, or the ramifications of having sex in a pool of milk?
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