Best Keanu: “He made me a better person, even if just for that moment.”

There’s a scene in Hardball where Conor O’Neill, the compulsive gambler played by Keanu Reeves, leaps up onto a fire escape. He’s on the run from the enforcers sent by a bookie to whom he owes money. Conor’s gymnastics allow him to get away, and they allow the audience — in this case, me — to be reminded that really the best Keanu is the physical Keanu, whether he’s learning to surf in Point Break or limping up stairs in John Wick: Chapter 4.

I saw Hardball about a week and a bit after seeing JW:4, the irony that Hardball‘s dramatic climax is not (spoiler) when the team wins the championship but (spoiler) when a child dies because of rapid-fire gun violence. In the case of Hardball, the gun violence is disturbing, of course, while in JW:4, it’s just John Wick — so far outside the realm of reality (how is the man still alive, really? How many times can you fall from a window, land on your back, and get back up again?) that it’s just plain awesome.

Hardball is not awesome, it’s not a great movie, but it’s not a terrible movie, either. It’s dated, mostly because of its overall vibe. I tried to discern whether it was based on a true story but couldn’t figure out if the original book was a novel or not. The end credits say it was inspired by actual events, but was mostly fictional. Which feels true, because although Conor isn’t perfect as a baseball coach, he’s got some serious stuff going on — it feels weird that he should so quickly and easily give up his gambling habit after one of his bookies makes a derogatory comment about Conor’s future career, to “coach baseball for black kids.”

The kids on Conor’s team live in appalling conditions, violent and unsafe. He’s a kind of white savior because he makes a deal to coach the team to get money to pay off a gambling debt. That’s not what makes him a savior, of course — it’s because he trades the game tickets he planned to scalp to buy them after-game pizza, and occasionally drives them home after practice. The character of Conor isn’t messed up enough to make sense, and also not redeemable enough to make sense either. He’s a muddy character you sort of want to root for, but also think he’s got a lot of stuff to figure out and maybe he should go off somewhere and do that.

One person apparently trying to help him sort things out is Elizabeth Wilkes, two of the baseball players’ schoolteacher. They have a flirtation that never really amounts to anything, but Ms. Wilkes tells Conor she knows about his gambling debts and helps him get a line on a job, which he eventually takes her up on. The lack of a more sustained romance between Elizabeth and Conor is one of the suprises of this movie, but it fits. The message seems to be that small acts of help and kindness can nudge people to a better place, and that change happens slowly. Conor won’t be saved by a relationship any more than he can save his baseball kids from dying by gun violence.

Elizabeth is played by Diane Lane, and I really liked her and Keanu together. I’m not sure if she’s on the list of female actors Keanu has worked with on multiple movies (and that list is long, as if it’s not an accident. If one film goes well, maybe that’s a set up for a future pairing. Off the top of my head, I can think of lots of female actors who have starred opposite Keanu more than once: Charlize Theron, Rachel Weisz, Uma Thurman, Winona Ryder, Ana de Armas, and there are probably many more). But I would like to see Diane Lane and Keanu Reeves together again, because there’s an ease with which they move in space together on screen.

This post is the first I’ve done on this website since last August, because life happens and life isn’t always rosy. I was reminded, renting Hardball with the free rental code that came with my movie theatre concession combo from the screening of John Wick: Chapter 4, that there’s a real delight in watching old Keanu Reeves movies. He’s still somehow always Keanu no matter what he’s doing on screen, still pulling out a few common bags of tricks — in Hardball, he gestures forward with both hands, as if to say, “ok, whatever,” the exact move he’ll use to convey the same sentiment about 17 years later during a hunting scene in Siberia, and probably has used countless other times. Maybe (probably) I’ll do a post about the Keanu parallels — how he says “what?” across dozens of films, and how the “I understand” of Matrix: Resurrections and the “I understand” of John Wick: Chapter 4 are somehow both perfect and poignant, but not identical — because Keanu is an actor, overall, and an underestimated one at that.

Especially when he’s jumping up a fire escape.

April 2023