The Yankles directed by David R. Brooks, DZB Productions, color, 115 minutes.
By Donald H. Harrison
SAN DIEGO—Do you have a child or grandchild who has a favorite bedtime story? Even though he or she knows how the story turns out, the child likes to hear it again and again. Repetition does not diminish the enjoyment, it enhances it.
That’s how many of us Americans are about baseball movies. Almost from the minute they begin, we know how they will turn out, but we love them anyway – perhaps because we are reassured that baseball is a great equalizer, in which talent, hard work, and rightness of purpose must prevail.
I won’t tell you how Yankles, a very funny comedy with many side adventures into the world of American haredi Jews, concludes, but let’s see if you can’t guess.
Charlie Jones (Bruce Wimmer) is a center fielder for a major league team who literally “drops the ball” in a post-season game, thereby becoming solely responsible for his team’s big loss. He slips into alcoholism and after a second DUI arrest, he is sent to prison. But Elliot (Michael Buster), a rabbinical student who is the younger brother of Charlie’s girlfriend Debra (Susanne Sutchy), believes in him. And upon being paroled, Charlie has to do many weeks of community service. Elliot decides Charlie would be perfect to coach his Yeshiva’s baseball team—the sorriest bunch of fielders and batters since the Bad News Bears. Reluctantly Charlie agrees, if only to get back into Debra’s good graces.
So who do you imagine is the bigger beneficiary of this temporary alliance – the Yeshiva team or the fallen major leaguer? Who, in the end, coaches who?
There are some hilarious moments in this movie, including a scene after Jones is informed that he may only use “kosher swear words” while coaching the Yeshiva bochers. Complying, he manages to mispronounce “tuchus” and every other part of the Jewish lower anatomy as he tries to whip his “Yankles” into shape.
There are some nice surprises in this movie including a performance by Joshua Nelson and the Kosher Gospel Singers, a black Jewish group familiar to attendees of the 2009 San Diego Jewish Music Festival and other communal events over the years. And an actor from our nostalgic past plays Frankie, the disaffected father of Elliot: Don Most, who many of us in the older generation remember as “Ralph Malph” from the old Happy Days television series.
Baseball. Happy Days. Jewish gospel. Comedy. It’s all good!
The Yankles will be shown during the San Diego Jewish Film Festival at 8:15 p.m, Saturday, Feb. 12; as well as at 11 a.m., Sunday, Feb. 20, at the Clairemont Reading Movie Theatres, 4665 Clairemont Drive, San Diego.
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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World