"Practice is the road to perfection."
The Phantom of the Open is nowhere near the best film of the year but I think it will end up being the one that I enjoyed watching the most.
Based on a true story, Maurice Flitcroft (Mark Rylance) is a crane driver in Barrow-in-Furness. Faced with the threat of redundancy, Maurice decides that he will take up golf and enters the British Open. He ends up scoring the worst round in the competition's history and becomes a popular hero, much to the chagrin of the golf establishment.
The true story is really quirky. Flitcroft wasn't simply just an amateur, he was a complete non-golfer whose very first round was one of the biggest competitions in the world! He entered the Open at various times using false personas including 'frenchman' Gerald Hoppy. His twin sons were world disco dance champions. It really is one of those stories that you can't make up.
This does feel like the typical plucky British underdog story. It does eschew many sports film clichés due to the fact that it's clear that Flitcroft is never likely to even muster a decent golf score let alone win anything. It doesn't do anything especially unusual and I suspect I will forget many of the details very quickly.
But more than anything, this is such an uplifting story. Mark Rylance manages to make Flitcroft a genuinely likeable character- until the very end of the film there's no sense of irony about what he is doing, he's naïve rather than in on the joke. Screenwriter Simon Farnaby also wrote for Paddington and Flitcroft has a similar feel to the famous bear, in the way he's likeable, kind and uncomplicated.
I really like the way the family is pitched as a big part of this film. We see how Flitcroft fell in love with his wife Jean (Sally Hawkins in a role she can play in her sleep) and the film never goes down the line of having Jean and Maurice fall out- she's always supportive. Maurice passes on his belief he can do anything to his disco dancing twins but his relationship with stepson Michael is more complicated, leading to some conflict.
It follows a well-worn formula but this is one of the better British underdog movies, thanks not least to Mark Rylance as the lead, but more than anything it's just a really joyful film to watch.
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