“Mudville,” Reviewed: An Atlanta Filmmaker’s Expansive D.I.Y. Family Drama

The other day, I suddenly remembered a film I’d seen and admired ten years ago, “The Arbalest,” which, as a juror at the 2016 South by Southwest festival, I’d supported for the Grand Prize. Now I wondered whether it was streaming (answer: yes) and whether its director, Adam Pinney, had made another film. A quick search revealed that he’d not only made one, called “Mudville,” but that it had premièred a few weeks before, at the Atlanta Film Festival, near his home town of Lilburn, Georgia. It’s a baseball-centric family melodrama (named after the fictitious setting of the poem “Casey at the Bat,” a classic of failure and disappointment), and an article in a local arts journal was full of enticing details about its extremely D.I.Y. production. Pinney wrote, directed, shot, recorded sound, edited, and created the score, among other things. The movie was filmed in and near the house in Lilburn that he shares with his family, and three of the central characters are played by his own family members: his wife, Amanda Pinney, and their young children, Max and Mavis.

I got in touch with Pinney, whom I’d met at SXSW, mentioning my serendipitous curiosity and hoping to see the film. He generously sent over a screener, and, I confess, little in the published descriptions, however intriguing, prepared me for what I saw. The story is simple but detailed and nuanced: a forty-seven-year-old man named Ray Patterson (played by the actor Mark Podojil, a longtime friend) is pursuing a dream of playing ball. A quarter century ago, he was a rookie with the major-league team the Atlanta Apaches (a stand-in for the real-life Braves) when, before he could play his first game, he drove under the influence and was let go. Now, while his wife, Holly, heads to work, he spends his days caring for their younger child and also dashing off to a nearby baseball field to hit off a tee, in the hope of making it to the major-league team again. (At times, his mad ambition turns his parenting downright reckless.) Ray is also an alcoholic, hiding bottles in a toilet tank, an attic, a fireplace flue, even filling a soda bottle with booze for his workout. Holly displays saintly patience but also lets him know that it will run out.

“The Arbalest” was a maximalist movie done on a minimal budget, a period piece set in the sixties and seventies, teeming with characters and imagination, decorated and dialogue-heavy and concept-stuffed. “Mudville,” by contrast, is largely a story of loneliness. Ray struggles to hide his drink, to get a drink, to get away on his own and pursue his Sisyphean labors of hammering a bucket of baseballs off a tee and then wandering through the field to collect them and start again. Yet despite the minimal setup and action the movie feels expansive and ample. The Patterson house is filled with children’s drawings, family memorabilia, tchotchkes, posters, plants, and a wide variety of domestic accoutrements, in an eye-catching spectrum of colors. The household hums with collective energy and vibrates with handiwork, intention, love. The back yard, casually unkempt and shaded by tall trees, exudes natural splendor. The route to the public park beyond is wide, and the lush green baseball field, next to woodlands, is complete with a batting cage, fences, and stands. Pinney’s avid, canny compositions put these varied appurtenances in plain view, foreground and background, making these empty outdoor spaces feel implicitly busy with civic life and labor.

Pinney’s vision in “Mudville” is no less decorative than that of his first film, but here it seems naturally so, as if here were making a documentary about an ornamented world. (He’s also credited with the production design.) Scenes of playtime on the living-room floor, or of dinner amid cheerful family chat, all feel deeply lived in and plainly observed, even as the objects of daily life, from a doorknob to a sippy cup, take on outsized dramatic power. Audiovisual elements conjure intricate inner worlds, too—a monologue in which Ray fantasizes about his induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame, voice-over telephone calls with an Apaches executive (voiced by Mike Brune, from “The Arbalest”), a podcast that delivers Ray’s painful baseball backstory, even a film-within-a-film—which are further revealed in several dream sequences and waking hallucinatory fantasies.