Giants Being Lonely movie review (2021)

The cinematography by Hunter Zimny and editing by Ismael de Diego leave much unexplained, letting our imagination fill in the gaps. This is underscored with the leafy, naturalistic North Carolina setting and the near-absence of technology, which give the story a timeless quality and allow for the kinds of missed connections that cell phones and email have all-but-eliminated from contemporary stories. 

The title is inspired by the last line of a poem by Carl Sandburg about "old men sitting near the exits of life" who speak of the giants in the old days but understand that all giants are lonely. The epigraph of the film, though, is more existential, telling us that life is miserable and we don't know when death will come, so we might as well play ball.

Patterson is an artist and photographer who brings a gift for visual images to the storytelling. The baseball team's uniforms, from costume designers Bruno DiCorcia and Lex Imgrüth, are a vivid yellow, and some striking images show a player set off against a dark background, at once surrounded by his team and alone. Most significantly, the two main characters, both pitchers on the team, are not related but they are played by brothers with a strong physical resemblance so that we have to remind ourselves who is who and consider how their characters mirror each other.

Those characters are A and B, Adam (Ben Irving) and Bobby (Jack Irving). We first see them with their team in the dugout, the coach barking at them to "find something inside you that's going to propel you to play better." He tells them they are narcissistic and privileged. The boys may not understand that his comments about how girls won't be interested in them unless they have money comes from his own bitterness at the way his life turned out, but we do. It is only later, though, that we learn he's not just the coach but Adam's father, and that he is physically abusive.