'Calvin Marshall' hits a home run!

The baseball movie is a relatively small group and has seen few contributions in the last decade, most of them unremarkable to say the least. Writer-director Gary Lundgren’s Calvin Marshall aims to set itself apart from the clichés of the genre as baseball really acts as the foundation for the dramatics that ensue, yet is not the only significant component of the picture. Calvin Marshall is an excellent baseball film precisely because it does not exclusively lay focus on the game, but can be fully enjoyed even by those who have no interest in the sport whatsoever. It’s the characters that beautify Calvin Marshall, not the game they play.

The premise centers on Calvin Marshall (Alex Frost), an aspiring major league baseball player, who struggles in his third year at Bayford City College to make the baseball team. Given his Rudy-esque resilience and adoration for the sport, Coach Doug Little (Steve Zahn) agrees to let him be involved with the team, but under specific restrictions. Meanwhile, Marshall begins dating the very talented Tori Jensen (Michelle Lombardo), the junior college’s star volleyball player. Regardless of the obvious disparity in their sports playing talents, the two consequently start to fall for one another.

Our setting, therefore, is primarily in and around a junior college, which is both refreshing and somewhat unusual. This is not a large, well-renowned university. Most films tend to portray college life as an experience involving big, sprawling, immaculate buildings complete with overpriced tuitions and a host of students who look as if they’ve stepped off the set of a CW show. It’s the top-tier universities that often receive more representation than any other, despite the glaring reality that most of us do not end up at those schools, ever. Thus, it’s a pleasant shock to find a film that does not adhere to those predetermined guidelines and plays out its story at a small town, average, presumably more affordable college with a very modest amount of romanticizing.

The plot is fairly uneventful, but engrossing nevertheless due to its wealth of strong performances. Zahn as Coach Little consumes every scene in which he appears. Little is an amusing would be leader and part-time drunk, who tries without much success to wear a stern and self-possessed demeanor, although Little, as a former minor league player, has his own closeted, glaring regrets of shattered dreams and missed opportunities. Unfortunately, we are provided with very little background or a concrete understanding of Little’s personal dilemmas, but what we are given, Zahn executes with superb comedic style and irony.

Alex Frost as the ever-determined title character is impressively vulnerable, despite his character’s evident shortcomings in sports talent and apparent self-delusion. Frost makes Marhsall to be someone we want to see thrive at whatever he decides to pursue. Frost’s chemistry with Michelle Lombardo is fervent enough and promotes the film from being just a routine story about young love. Lombardo handles the weight of her dynamic character with apparent effortlessness. Tori's relationship with Marshall is presented just as any relationship should be played out: amorous, complicated and occasionally downright painful.

Second to our leads’ love woes are the tremendous set of supporting players, chief among them being Simon (Josh Fadem), Coach Dewey (Abraham Benrubi of ER fame), and Rosie Thomas as Sondra in a pithy, yet delightful role accompanied by some strikingly angelic singing. These supporting players provide a healthy and comical ingredient plus additional padding to the sometimes dreary proceedings involving those connected to our protagonist.

Calvin Marhsall idolizes, cares for, and practices a sport that frankly, he’s just not very skillful at. At face value, the moral appears to be: pursuing your childhood dreams is an essential life motto even if you never excel at it. Underneath that concept is a deeper, somewhat bleaker realization that your talents or lack thereof do not always align with the career that you desire to partake in, especially when that profession has as narrow a gateway as professional baseball. Calvin Marshall declares that not all dreams can come true, no matter how hard you work or how much potential you possess, and perhaps in comprehending such a notion there is a happy ending. Talent is not always readily discernible and may require some time to be nourished and totally exploited. That in and of itself is inspiring and certainly something to live by.