MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Stealing Home’ Doesn’t Make It to First Base

“Stealing Home” (citywide), with its convoluted structure, soft jazz score and wistfully confessional air, might pass these days for a “personal” Hollywood film. It’s a weird, glossed-up hybrid. Soggy with borrowed nostalgia, it treats the identity crises of a failed minor league baseball player as if he were a suffering artist, struggling in a world that had no place for baseball.

The story spans several decades in the life of Billy Wyatt (played by Mark Harmon and the younger William McNamara and Thatcher Goodwin), an idealistic but easily bruised scion of an upper-middle-class Philadelphia suburban family. As the adult Billy falls into reverie during a tight baseball game, we glide back, with saxophone smears and piano plunks, over the turning points of his life. It began in the city’s Main Stem but somehow spiraled down into chaos and cocktail waitresses, stubbled chins and sloppy motel rooms.

Billy’s crucial experiences emerge in the tangle of flashbacks. They include losing his virginity to a neighbor girl and his father to an accident; stealing home during a high school baseball game; having an affair with his ex-baby sitter, Katie (Jodie Foster) and, years later, wandering feverishly around town with Katie’s ashes after she has committed suicide. (Does he steal home again? We’ll leave that question to more facile minds.)

If the juxtapositions seems trivial, that’s the movie’s method. The philosophical point of the film’s co-writers/co-directors, Steven Kampmann and Will Aldis, seems to be no more provocative than “Grab for all the gusto you can!” Or maybe “Play ball!” Where a director like Jean Renoir or Francois Truffaut, who may have inspired this movie’s incessant freeze-frames, might build these juxtapositions into a sense of truth, here we get the reverse. Kampmann and Aldis relentlessly transform life into kitsch.

Consider the extremely coy sex scenes, some of which seem to have been lifted from “Summer of ’42.” They conclude with Billy and the wild, salty, free-spirited Katie in seaside consummation. Even the “free spirit” dispirits you. Katie’s siren call seems a jumbled invitation to smoke cigarettes, be yourself, soar skyward like Jonathan Livingston Seagull and join in something that sounds suspiciously like the “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.” Not even Foster at her brightest-eyed can light a fire under any of that.

“Stealing Home” has an ambitious structure. But it’s a futile ambition, like Billy’s. What kind of baseball career does he expect at 38? Are we supposed to be happy he’s been rescued from cocktail waitresses? Maybe they have bruised, suffering souls too. . . .

The movie is at its best when it’s being flip and jocular, at its weakest when it gropes coldly for our heartstrings. Some of the more amusing moments come from Harold Ramis as the drolly conformist elder Alan Appleby. But overall, “Stealing Home” (MPAA rated PG-13, for sex, nudity and language) plays like self-pitying shtick, rich-kid reverie without a cause. There’s a curious arrested development here, as if the characters all got trapped together at a high school reunion, stuck in an ashes-to-ashes running gag. Life, death, baseball, virginity, rebellion, stealing home: They’re all just one more smeary saxophone break.