The Phenom (Elephant Eye Films, Conquistador Entertainment, RLJ Entertainment, 2016)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, March 12) my husband Charles and I watched a truly odd 2016 movie called The Phenom, about a young pitcher named Hopper Gibson (Johnny Simmons), who’s blessed with a killer fastball and impeccable control until one night, playing in a major-league game for the Atlanta Braves, he throws five wild pitches in a row and gets demoted to the minor leagues. Written and directed by Noah Buschel for a studio called RLJ Entertainment, The Phenom is a surprisingly gloomy movie – probably the most depressing modern-dress film I’ve seen since the 1995 film Leaving Las Vegas, directed by Mike Figgis and starring Nicolas Cage as a burned-out Hollywood screenwriter and Elizabeth Shue as Sera, a prostitute who’s similarly burned out and hooks up with Cage’s character on his way to drinking himself to death. The team Hopper pitches for hires a psychiatrist named Dr. Mobley (Paul Giamatti, two years after his sensational performance as real-life therapist Dr. Eugene Landy in the Brian Wilson biopic Love and Mercy, in which he was so convincing the real Brian Wilson, visiting the set, freaked out at the sight of him), to try to help him get his mojo back.

Hopper is a virtual basket case, having long since lost any sense of fun in the game and feeling pressured not only by the team’s dependence on him but also the burden of his own father, Hopper Gibson, Sr. (a marvelous performance by Ethan Hawke – and for once Ethan Hawke and Johnny Simmons look enough alike they’re believable as father and son), who was himself a hot-shot pitcher once upon a time until he burned out and ended up a drug addict and petty criminal. Hopper, Jr. bought a palatial mansion for his mother, Susan Gibson (Alison Elliott), no doubt with his signing bonus from the Braves. He also has a sort-of girlfriend, Dorothy Boyer (Sophie Kennedy Clarke), though their relationship is sufficiently on the rocks that one night, while on tour with his minor-league team, he allows himself to be picked up by Candace Cassidy (Louisa Krause) – only it’s a trap. Candace’s boyfriend invades her room with a shotgun and the two rob Hopper at gunpoint, though it’s unclear just how much they get out of him. Meanwhile, Hopper, Sr. signs on to a gang that promises him that proverbial “one last job” that will supposedly make him enough money to set him up for life – only, like so many “one last jobs” in the history of crime films, the caper, involving smuggling drugs across the U.S.-Mexico border, gets all the participants busted and facing long prison sentences. Hopper, Jr. goes to visit his dad in jail and dad essentially tells him that he shouldn’t waste his time, energy and concentration on supporting him.

The film eventually drags its way to an open-ended finish in which the Braves, running out of pitchers just as they’ve entered the playoffs, call Hopper back to the majors – only we don’t see what happens after that! A classic-era director and writer doing this story would have had Hopper break out of his “yips,” as they’re called in the dialogue, win the big game for his team, get married to Dorothy and live happily ever after. Given the overall tone of this film, both Charles and I were expecting a downbeat ending in which Hopper would lose the big game for his team and end up a physical and psychological wash-out headed for the same dire fate as his dad. But either of those endings would have been preferable to the non-ending we got – and Charles and I both noted that this was the second night in a row, after the 1947 Barbara Stanwyck vehicle The Other Love, we’d seen a film with this sort of non-ending. While Stanwyck was no doubt disappointed that the makers of The Other Love didn’t give her the sort of bravura death-bed scene Bette Davis had got in Dark Victory and Merle Oberon in Wuthering Heights (and decades later Ali McGraw would get in Love Story), at least The Other Love’s director, André De Toth, powerfully suggested her death by pulling the camera back from the bungalow she and her doctor turned husband (David Niven) were sharing. Noah Buschel didn’t give Johnny Simmons the chance to act anything suggesting the ultimate fate of his character, good or ill.