You're Reminiscin' About Me, Smalls
A Formalist Approach to The Sandlot (1993)
The Sandlot (1993) – Formalist
I think we all need some levity, so let’s do a kid’s classic this week. I had never seen this one, and truth be told, I’m not crazy about films with child-centric main casts (see my A Christmas Story review and E.T. review about how loud children were in 80s films), so I tend not to watch them unprompted. This week, however, I threw it on and thoroughly enjoyed myself. David Mickey Evans’s The Sandlot (1993) is a riot and so incredibly fun, I feel as though I’ve missed out on not having seen it prior. The Review Roulette wheel landed on formalist for our approach this week, so I want to think about the framing of the story primarily.
The Sandlot is about a group of kids who gather regularly to play baseball in a California neighborhood sandlot in 1962. The film spans the first summer Scotty Smalls (Tom Guiry) spends in town and the shenanigans the circa-10-year-old kids get up to all summer long. Like many stories about significant childhood moments, however, The Sandlot is framed with the narration of an older Scotty Smalls voiced by director and writer Evans. I love this approach, and I know it is not directly formalist in terms of cinematography and technical aspects of the film, but the framing dictates the form, and I want to explore that more.
The second I hear an adult narrator over a child-centric film, I am immediately more invested than a film without it because that introduces an interesting layer of an unreliable narrator. We have two elements that cause that: 1) the unreliability of human memories and 2) the appeal of childlike wonder to exaggerate. These stories that are framed as being told decades after the events happened are often fanciful and exaggerated or at the very least filtered through those decades causing an amalgamation of memories that distort the story at hand. For instance, in one sequence over the 4th of July, we can hear Ray Charles’s rendition of “America the Beautiful”, but that version of the song was not recorded until a decade after the events of the film. That anachronism invites us to view everything else in the film as a distortion of the reminiscence of a man sharing how he met his best friends.
In other moments, we get dialogue that seems to be filtered through how a child understood it when hearing it. Scotty’s mom (Karen Allen), for example, tells him to go out and get into trouble, puts blame on him for not making friends, and tells him that he will “always be an egghead with an attitude like that”. I think it is safe to assume that this is how a child might hear a parent’s concern about their loneliness, especially considering that they have only just moved to town after the school year, at the very start of summer. Expecting a child to have already made friends, or, further, blaming the child for not having done so seems to me like a child’s projections onto his mother’s words that are then filtered through those years of development and remembered by an adult 20-30 years later.
So, the soundtrack reflects the inherent inaccuracies of memory, and the dialogue sometimes insinuates exaggerated interpretations of those distorted memories. The framing of the adult narrator’s reflections makes this film a whimsical, funny experience that encourages the audience to lean into the childlike zeal for that best ever summer they might remember in their own childhoods. The frame dictates the form of the film, and this is best exemplified visually in the story of The Beast.
The Beast is a creature behind the fence at the edge of the sandlot, that grumbles and groans and makes sounds that are not of this world with bone chilling echoes of beings lost to it. Or so we are led to believe by the film’s sound mixing. Gradually we learn more about The Beast and his origins, climaxing with a sequence told by one of Scotty’s friends, Squints (Chauncey Leopardi), who is also objectively the absolute worst of Scotty’s friends, to be clear.
The recitation of the origins of The Beast are told through multiple layers: adult Scotty is telling us what young Squints remembers of the story his dad told him about the rumors of what happened 20 years prior. So, the origins of The Beast are about 40-50 years old by the time Scotty is recounting them in his filmic memoir and also filtered through multiple people and their memories, similar to how The Sandlot is itself a project in memory. What sells this distorted memory of that particular story, though, is the perfection of shot design. Squints’s story is told in black and white reminiscent of an early 50s kind of horror with The Beast only partially shown to build suspense and fear, emphasizing its monstrous qualities and larger-than-life persona. The sequence is brilliant and a microcosmic example of the distortions of memory and emotion that color the larger film around it.
All in all, I really enjoyed The Sandlot and I think it was largely because of the invitation to engage with it with a nostalgic, reminiscent rose-tinted longing for those summers spent with friends. The framing of a narrator imports that childlike freedom to have fun not only in the plot but also in the form of the film, in the soundtrack, the text, and the cinematography.
Because I’m Never Done When I Say I Am
Textual
(As a reminder, “textual” is one of our new approaches with which I want to look at the literal text of the film, i.e. the script.) Full disclosure, I didn’t know “You’re killin’ me, Smalls” was from The Sandlot, and so I definitely didn’t know that its first context is about Scotty Smalls not knowing what a s’more is, and, guys, how precious? I thought it was a little more aggressive, not a cute little thing Scotty’s friend says to him when he’s initiating him into his own childhood traditions, and I think that’s beautiful. To tie this to the earlier section, the framing of Scotty’s adult memory of his childhood suggests that he remembered this phrase specifically as it’s used twice in the movie, and he chose to include it in his remembrance of that first summer making friends with the sandlot boys. It’s so far from aggressive that it comes back around to being aggressively adorable.