Stealing Home

Take some threads from The Big Chill, weave in plenty of thirtysomething, and throw in a bit of Bull Durham – you have the design for Stealing Home. This is a movie that, in an evidently sincere way, touches a lot of the familiar bases of the baby boom generation. While it is sincere, it’s only intermittently successful.

It’s one of those convoluted flashback movies in which we’re brought up to date on the main character’s situation with a string of lengthy looks-back. The protagonist, a washed-up minor-league baseball payer (Mark Harmon), has been living an existence of despondency for some time when he learns that an old friend has died, and that she has willed him her ashes.

As he returns to his hometown, the flashbacks fill us in on his history. The woman was his former babysitter (Jodie Foster), who introduced him to a certain wildness and sense of fun. She was a free spirit who had a lot to do with him pursuing a baseball career in his teens, after the shock of his father’s death.

It follows that reliving these old memories, and making a few new ones in the present tense, helps him get his life back on track. (It also helps him figure out what to do with her ashes.)

Stealing Home is written and directed by Steven Kampmann and Will Aldis, who get a lot of mileage out of old songs (they make all the obvious choices), fashions, and adolescent buddy humor.

The best section of the movie involves an extended flashback to the summer in which our hero (played as a teenager by William McNamara) and his pal (Jonathan Silverman) hang out at the beach and dream of babes and baseball, with particular attention to a red-headed “goddess” to whom the pal will (happily) surrender his virginity.

The other parts of the movie have problems. Harmon, for one thing, doesn’t exactly radiate the burned-out hopelessness that his character is supposed to embody; he’s not a deep enough actor at this point, and the strain dulls his usual likability.

The fundamental difficulty, however, is that we never quite see what Foster gives him, or how she has influenced his life in such a profound way. Or why he would ever dissolve into such self-destruction.

What Stealing Home does have is a few isolated goodies, such as the adolescent sexual initiation that is interrupted by an oblivious parent, and an adult scene in which Harmon and his now-grown pal (Harold Ramis) get drunk and sneak into a baseball stadium at night. These are nice elements that a good director might have brought home, but this film leaves them stranded at third.

First published in The Herald, August 1988

One of those “dispose of the remains” movies, eh? I’d forgotten that detail. The cast also includes Blair Brown, Richard Jenkins, and Helen Hunt. Co-director Aldis, who died in 2019, was also known as Will Porter; he and Kampmann also wrote, under pseudonyms, the notorious Clifford, with Martin Short as a 10-year-old.