Everyman BristolPhantom of the Open is a lovely, heart-warming little film. The opening caption says that it's based on a true story, but I have to say I don't believe a word of it. It ends, American Splendour style, with a montage of clips from contemporary BBC news programmes and footage of the real-life people who the characters in the film are based on. I checked on Wikipedia and it's all true. I still don't believe a word of it. We've kind of seen this kind of thing before, from the Full Monty down to Fisherman's Friends, a kind of modern-English take on one of those "let's do the show right here" back-stage dramas. A well meaning amateur gets hopeless out of his depth, and ends up beating the big boys at their own game through sheer gumption and self-belief. I imagine Elton John or someone is composing the songs for the Broadway musical as we speak. The twist is that Maurice Flitcroft doesn't beat the big guys at their own game. He remains endearingly useless to the last, but finds a kind of celebrity has grown out of his hopelessness. The English like underdogs; and our innate sportsmanship tells us to admire a gracious loser more than a sore winner.
So: Maurice is northern (check) working class (check) and about to be made redundant (check.) He speaks haltingly but with homely and poetic wisdom. (Practice, he keeps saying, is the road to perfection.) In danger of losing his ship yard job (Mrs Thatcher briefly pops up on his newfangled remote controlled TV) he decides more or less at random to become a golfer, even though he has never played golf and has to learn the rules from a book. He enters the British Open (lying about his professional status) and achieves the worst score in the sport's history. The snobby golfing establishment is furious, change the rules so he can't enter again, ban him from every golf club in the country, so he puts on a silly moustache, and enters under a false name. He does slightly, but only slightly, better. Having made himself and his family look ridiculous, he is on the point of quitting, when he discovers that he's become a minor celebrity. He his asked to go to America where a posh golf club has named a tongue in cheek trophy after him. So he's kind of vindicated. Follow your dreams. No one can say you didn't try. Etc. The facts appear to be true; including the bizarre subplot about his twin sons being world disco-dancing champions. But there has clearly been some writerly input to create an actual emotional arc. ("Man enters tournament, man loses, man tries again, man still loses" would not have had either an Aristotelian or Cambellian structure.) Maurice's grown-up son Mike, having gone all middle-class and got a management job at the ship yards, is ashamed of his crazy dad and tells the disco dancing twins that they should stop following their dreams and get proper jobs instead. But he changes his mind and follows Dad out to America, arriving at the golf club just as Maurice is making a tongue tied but eloquent speech about how his wife and family made it all possible. Maurice apparently takes six spoonfulls of sugar in his tea, and puts almost as much sugar into his speech I enjoyed the polaroid-tinged imagery of the opening vignette and the retro-credits at the end, and there are some laugh-out-loud comic beats. I think the bullet-time shots of golf-balls hanging in mid-air were over done, and the dream sequences (in which Maurice imagines himself to be a golf ball, spinning around the earth like Christopher Reeve) seems to belong in an entirely different movie. The movie portrays Flitcroft as naive - almost as a holy fool - who honestly thinks he's in with a chance and believing that practice will make perfect. The 1970s newspapers seem to have seen him as prankster; he may have had a previous career in a circus. One cannot help thinking of William McGonagall: I wonder whether the world's worst golfer was, like the world's worst poet, in on the joke from the beginning. Buy me some popcorn next time I go to a movie [Image]
"Phantom of the Open"
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