98 min | PG | May 12, 2023 | Sony Pictures Classics
Yogi Berra wins ten World Series rings and gets remembered for the malapropisms. His granddaughter sets out to fix that. The numbers were always hiding in plain sight.
It Ain’t Over is a documentary about Yogi Berra. It is also a documentary about how a man can win everything and still get reduced to a cartoon. Yogi Berra plays eighteen seasons for the Yankees, wins three Most Valuable Player awards, and appears in fourteen World Series. The culture remembers the quotes and the cartoon bear named after him instead. The film’s thesis is that the lovable persona buried one of the best catchers in baseball history, and that the burial was a kind of theft.
Lindsay Berra narrates as both granddaughter and advocate, and her frustration gives the film its spine. She is not a neutral guide. She wants the record corrected and she pushes the talking heads toward that conclusion. Bob Costas supplies the historical context with the precision of a man who has memorized the box scores. Derek Jeter and Willie Randolph speak as Yankees who understand what the position demands. Billy Crystal provides the fan’s worship and the comedy, and Vin Scully’s archival voice carries the weight of someone who watched it all happen live.
Sean Mullin directs and writes, and he structures the film around a single galling moment. The 2015 All-Star Game honors the four greatest living players and leaves Berra off the list while he watches at home. Mullin uses that snub as the engine that drives the entire argument. The editing leans hard on archival footage of Berra crouched behind the plate, and the old film stock makes the case that the highlights forgot the defense. The score stays warm and unobtrusive and never fights the testimony.
This is a conventional talking-heads portrait and it does not pretend otherwise. It builds its emotion through accumulation rather than formal risk. The film loves its subject and makes no effort to hide it, and the affection is the point rather than a flaw. By the end the statistics and the stories converge on the same conclusion. Yogi Berra was a great player first and a beloved character second, and the film insists the order matters.