POINT OF RELEASE
Synopsis
4/6/2010
Copyright Chris Martens – martenterprises@comcast.net
He’s got a fastball that blinds batters; a curveball that humiliates them. He’s the best high school pitching prospect in Queens and the scouts are swarming. What they don’t know is that every time Christy Farrell takes the mound he’s worried about a lot more than just the strike zone sixty feet away. He’s thinking about another strike zone at home where his younger sisters live with their mentally unbalanced mother.
Based on a true story, POINT OF RELEASE takes place in 1974 and it follows the final season of the St. Francis Terriers and their troubled star, Christy Farrell. It is a story about a young man who only wants to play baseball yet is forced to make a decision that will determine the fate of himself, his mother and his two younger sisters and in so doing define for himself the meaning of family. It is a tragic story because not all of them will survive. It is a hopeful story because some of them will. It is a powerful story because all of it is true. In the end POINT OF RELEASE is the story of gifted teenage athlete and the bitter price he must pay to enter adulthood.
Haunted by the tragic death several years earlier of a younger son, the Farrell family teeters on self-destruction. Their father could not cope and he simply walked away. Their mother, Betty, battles daily with painful memories and lacerating guilt increasingly finding comfort in her own imaginary worlds. Their grandmother, Nana, lives in strict Catholic denial, believing that mental illness is not a disease at all but only a broken covenant with God. And son, Christy Farrell, finds release in his own artificial world, one defined by straight lines, simple rules and immutable logic: baseball. It is a world where he can dominate, where he can overpower, where he can find simple meaning. It is a world where he can be a hero and little boys don’t die.
But reality has a way of intruding on even the most carefully constructed escapes. And as their mother’s fragile sanity continues to crumble, Christy painfully comes to accept the fact that his two little sisters are increasingly at risk. As the Championship season marches on the strike outs mount, the victories count and success envelopes Christy Farrell so closely that he can breathe it. But just as the Brass Ring comes around fate puts up a road block and nothing going forward will ever be the same.
At times moving, funny, coarse and sweet, POINT OF RELEASE is the story of Christy Farrell’s painful awakening as he is forced to decide between following his dreams and saving his family.
Copyright Chris Martens – All Rights Reserved. martenterprises@comcast.net
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