Summer Catch

Baseball, summer, apple pie, and Freddie Prinze Jr.'s bare butt -- what could be more American? Toss in a brief glance at Matthew Lillard's equally nekkid behind and you've got a better-late-than-never entry in the clichéd teen love-story genre that, while generally inoffensive, is nonetheless so cloyingly heartfelt that it's all you can do not to giggle every time someone makes a prophetic, lovestruck proclamation (of which there are many). Summer Catch has one thing going for it and that's its setting: gorgeous Chatham, Massachusetts, which, with its clapboard houses and great New England panache, elicits more sympathy and lust than any of the film's flesh-and-blood characters. Prinze plays Ryan Dunne, a Chatham townie who spends his summers cutting the lawns of the idle rich summer folk with his alcoholic father (Ward, creating the film's only flashes of solid acting in sight) and dreaming about becoming a big-league ball player. As a heavy-handed narration informs us, the Cape Cod summer league is the proving ground for the most talented young athletes in the country. Ryan, who has fumbled the proverbial ball elsewhere (the film is unclear on what hideous outburst has sent him packing from his previous b-boy incarnation) and recently lost his mother to illness, is on track for his final shot at the kinda-sorta big leagues. What Ryan doesn't count on is falling in love with socialite deb Tenley Parish (Biel, of WB's Seventh Heaven), a leggy muffy with a heart of gold, who just wants to tell her rich daddy to buzz off so she can follow her heart into architectural school. “I want to create,” she tells the romantically hornswoggled Ryan, just before diving into the family pool in a rainstorm in panties and half-shirt. Breaking training, indeed. There's never any question in the minds of anyone over the age of 10 that these two star-crossed young things will end up together, but I was hoping -- foolishly, I realize -- that director Tollin would include some prescient final shot -- à la The Graduate -- of the two of them riding off on a John Deere Supa-Mower with uncomfortable “now what?” smiles plastered across their heartthrob mugs. No such luck. Prinze, Lillard, and Biel are all pleasant enough to look at, but the film's Romeo and Juliet tropes are shopworn by now, and the movie gives us nothing else.