Golf is the only thing she loves, and the best player in town is running out of time. The Eagle and the Albatross, a 2020 American comedy-drama directed by Angela Shelton, pairs an orphaned teenager with a widowed optometrist on the fairways of a small town.
What is The Eagle and the Albatross about?
An orphaned girl, half Korean, arrives in small-town America to live with the one relative she has left. Nothing about the place is familiar, and the single thing she cares about is golf. Looking for someone who can help her improve, she seeks out the strongest player around, who turns out to be the local optometrist, a widower. He agrees to take her under his wing. What begins as lessons on the course becomes something larger for both of them, a shared effort to face the fear of losing the people they love and the game that holds them together. There is one complication neither can coach away: he has been given three months to live.
About the cast
Amber Liu leads the cast, with Adrienne Barbeau and Dan Lauria next on the bill. Bryce Romero, Michael Badalucco, Ritchie Montgomery, Jay Huguley and Jay Jay Warren round out the ensemble. Angela Shelton directs. The story depends on the pairing at its centre, a teenage newcomer and an older mentor, and the supporting players supply the small-town community that surrounds them.
Context & significance
Three genre labels sit on this film, comedy, drama and sports, and the premise explains why all three apply. The sports element is golf, a game of patience and repetition that suits a story about teaching and learning. The drama comes from grief on both sides: a girl who has lost her parents and a man who has lost his wife and now faces his own deadline. The comedy lives in the mismatch between them, a newcomer of mixed heritage and a settled local, in a town where everyone knows everyone. The title borrows two scoring terms from the game itself, an eagle and the much rarer albatross. Mentor stories in sports films usually build toward a big match; here the clock that matters is a personal one. The film is a United States production with a running time of 97 minutes.
Watching The Eagle and the Albatross on Ktime
The Eagle and the Albatross is available on K-Time with a Persian dub, so it can be watched in Farsi from start to finish. K-Time is a Persian-focused streaming service for the Iranian diaspora, with a Farsi interface for browsing and search. This page is free to read; playing the film requires logging in with a K-Time account.