PLAYTIME

The old film studios had house styles: M-G-M’s was plush and sentimental, Warner Bros.’ stark and intense.

- BY RICHARD BRODY

A fledgling independent-film collective, Omnes Films, goes a step further, having not only a house style, of loosely structured and finely observed microdramas, but also a house theme: finality and the making of memories. These traits marked the first feature by the Omnes co-founder Tyler Taormina, "Ham on Rye," about high-school classmates' dispersal after graduation, and his third, "Christmas Eve in Miller's Point," about an extended family's last holiday in its matriarch's house. The new Omnes feature, "Eephus," is the first to be directed by Carson Lund, who was Taormina's cinematographer on those films and now brings his own perspective to the Omnes style and theme. Lund's subject is baseball, his premise is historical, and his dramatic mode, though no less sharp-eyed and fragmented than Taormina's, is rooted in documentary filmmaking.

"Eephus" is set on a Sunday in October, sometime in the nineteen-nineties, at a baseball diamond in the small New England town of Douglas. A school is going to be built on the site of the field, and two teams, Adler's Paint and the Riverdogs, are about to play the last game that will ever be held there. The players, all men, range from college age to graybeard, from lithe to lumbering, and they approach this farewell game with all the sentiment and ceremony it demands. In most baseball movies, the sport is just a part of some bigger drama off the field, but for Lund the game's the thing: the movie begins as the players arrive and ends soon after the game does. Baseball is the star, the game is the story, and the only conflicts that matter are the ones that the athletes resolve in play.