by 
Ted Willliams, the last Major League Baseball player to maintain a .400 batting average for an entire season famously said, “Baseball is the only field of endeavor where a man can succeed three times out of ten and be considered a good performer.” He was speaking to the idea that if a player fails to get a hit seven times in ten tries he is considered successful.
Yes, baseball is hard. What’s harder than hitting a baseball is success in the face of imminent frustration. While all sports are methodical and process-driven in some form or another, baseball’s inherent high volume of failure places more importance on these ideas than other sports. If you lose sight of the larger goal, dealing with such an exorbitant amount of failure will deter you from any success. While baseball populates only the background of “Color Book” (Dir. David Fritz Fortune), its philosophy seeps into the story’s forefront.
“Color Book” centers around the relationship between Lucky (played by William Catlett) and his son Mason (Jeremiah Daniels), who has down syndrome, in the days after the passing of Tammy (Brandee Evans), Lucky’s wife and Mason’s mother. Much of the runtime consists of a day when Lucky decides to get his son out of the house, the pair trekking through Atlanta to catch a Braves game – Mason’s first.
Process is emphasized throughout the film. Scenes of Lucky teaching and helping Mason with various tasks are inhabited with lengthy close-ups of shirt-buttoning, waffle-making, necklace-crafting. Lucky’s normally gentle mode is shaken when his lessons geared towards Mason don’t properly seep in. His outbursts coincide with a loss of patience, ruminating on failure instead of having a short-term memory and reconfiguring to best set up a chance of success. Many of his and Mason’s best moments come from a place of acceptance, moving on to the next challenge with grace after moving past disappointment. His new role as a widower single parent pushes his ideas of process to the extreme.
Both Catlett and Daniels give excellent performances as the father-son duo. Catlett pulls off a difficult task in his performance as Lucky, playing tender with bouts of sternness, all the while grieving in silence. His angrier moments in the film may seem cold to strangers, but the viewer is always aware of the tightrope he constantly walks. Daniels is just as great as Mason, his uber-expressive physical performance carrying the weight of lengthy monologues. The two create a remarkably convincing parent-child dynamic, with all of the ebbs and flows that accompany such a relationship. Lucky and Mason’s relationship is reminiscent of the one at the center of Charlotte Wells’ “Aftersun”. The glaring difference is that “Color Book” plays out through Lucky’s point-of-view, rather than his child’s.
“Color Book” is shot with crisp black and white photography, effectively capturing not only the trials of Lucky and Mason, but also the city of Atlanta in a neo-realist vein, largely by way of the city’s metro system. The film’s lived-in, human visual aesthetic doesn’t negate any visual beauty, of which “Color Book” is full of.
The film first premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2024, and won the Audience Choice Award at the Chicago Film Festival in the same year. It was released wide on Netflix on June 19.
