How to pick a rainy day movie

Rainy day movies shouldn’t be too cerebral. You don’t watch
The Godfather or Memento on days like these. You peep a
horror marathon on Space, a romcom, an underappreciated
gutbuster—something you’ve seen 10 times. You want to revel in its
familiarity. Rainy days are for jokes you know and well-known moments
you cry at anyway, lulled by the rhythm of precipitation. They’re
Nightmare on Elm Street. So I Married An Axe Murderer.
Miss Congeniality.

For me, it’s 1992’s A League of Their Own. Set in 1943, it’s
based on the real-life All-American Girls Professional Baseball League,
created by Philip Wrigley to make money during WWII while the boys were
all at war. Sisters Dottie (Geena Davis) and Kit (Lori Petty) are
recruited from Nowheresville, Oregon, to play for Illinois’ Rockford
Peaches. On a pure sports-movie scale, it’s got gobs of baseball,
including the traditional climactic play—whether Dottie dropped the
ball on purpose was debated my entire adolescence. Suck it family, she
did! And Penny Marshall says so in her directors’ commentary—and
triumphant, Hans Zimmer-scored pans of packed stands symbolizing the
league’s success.

Its era allows for social commentary, and the movie handles those
moments with a deft touch—Shirley (Ann Cusack) learns to read in the
back of the bus; an African-American woman, banned from participating,
hurls an errant ball from the foul line to second base; Doris quietly
explains why she has no choice but to date a deadbeat (a decade before
her portrayer, Rosie O’Donnell, came out publicly); Evelyn (Bitty
Schram, Tom Hanks’ victim in the “No crying in baseball” scene) feeds
her kid chocolate to shut him up in the dugout. All the while, the
script takes shots at the ’40s woman, showing the players knitting,
serving the umpires coffee, attending beauty classes.

There’s a dance sequence, a singalong, at least three romances and
Madonna’s best performance (she’s always been underestimated as an
actor). But at its heart, framed larger by the Rockford Peaches, is the
sisters’ relationship, how much the lesser-talented Kit wants something
that comes so easily to Dottie, a dutiful wife first. When Kit gets
traded, it’s inevitable her team will face the Peaches in the World
Series (it’s no accident she’s a pitcher and Dottie’s a catcher), but
her final at-bat means more than the game—it’s the moment she emerges
from Dottie’s shadow, proving that she will ascend this era to take
what she wants. When Dottie drops the ball—on purpose—she
not only opens one last window for her sister, she closes the door on
her own talent. It’s a valid choice, too.

With all this content, all this tone, all these characters, the
movie shouldn’t work. (Marshall’s first cut was four hours long.) But
that’s where its re-watchability comes from—if you’re in for the
drama, the laughs, the feminism or the baseball, you will be
accommodated, often in the same scene. It’s quotable, breathtakingly
composed, thrillingly edited. Where most baseball movies have you root
for one side, it makes you choose (and makes that choice difficult). If
you’re lying on the couch, flipping around, you can passively watch
A League of Their Own and be entertained. Or you can watch it
actively, and be rewarded. Such is the silver lining of this rainy day
movie.

Tara Thorne was inspired as a writer, filmmaker and
teenaged power hitter by A League of Their Own. But she
does not want to join your recreational softball league because summer
is terrible.

This article appears in Jun 18-24, 2009.