Joe Torre after failing to win a championship when he was a professional baseball player and as Manager to three teams is named Manager of the Yankees. And he finds himself having players like Dwight Gooden, Wade Boggs and Daryl Strawberry who are considered has beens. And players like David Cone who are ill. But nevertheless thinks he can win with them. At the same he deals with the loss of one brother and another brother battling the same condition that killed his brother.
Described (rather cheekily) by director Michael Snow as a musical comedy, this deft probing of sound/image relationships is one of his wittiest, most entertaining and philosophically stimulating films. In his words, the film “derives its form and the nature of its possible effects from its being built from the inside, as it were, with the actual units of such a film, i.e. the frame and the recorded syllable. Thus its ‘dramatic’ element derives not only from a representation of what may involve us generally in life but from considerations of the nature of recorded speech in relation to moving light-images of people.’”