Golf is a sport of fundamental and often maddening paradoxes. For one, between equipment expenses, the exclusivity of country club courses to practice on, and the prospect of putting up with the elitist attitudes of players and administrators, it can be daunting for the amateur to participate in a professional tournament.
Adapted by Simon Farnaby from his own biographical book of the same name, Craig Roberts’s The Phantom of the Open depicts the true-life story of Maurice Flitcroft (Mark Rylance), a shipyard crane operator from Barrow-in-Furness who finagled his way into the 1976 British Open despite having virtually no golfing experience. But in relating the story of this man’s underdog spirit, the film increasingly gives itself over to hagiography.
Farnaby previously co-wrote Paddington 2, and The Phantom of the Open shares with that film a whimsical sense of anarchy, born of an innocently oblivious character finding himself thrust into an unfamiliar milieu and sparking a clash of classes. Maurice takes up golf on a whim and begins practicing, and in an extended centerpiece sequence, the man’s competitors in the British Open are understood to be avatars of the British upper class as a whole.
All the while, Maurice’s humorously inept attempts at setting up any kind of score feels like a subversive swipe at a society with rigid social decorum. But following Maurice’s bumbling performance in the British Open, the film loses its satiric edge as it begins to melodramatically and almost perfunctorily detail the man’s time of fame and notoriety.
Inheriting the mantle of folk hero, Maurice is constantly coming into contact with characters who seem to exist only to lavish praise and support upon him. His wife, Jean (Sally Hawkins), is no exception, though Hawkins brings a lovely poignancy to a moment in which her character describes how her husband helped her when she went through a rough patch earlier in life.
Even as The Phantom of the Open idolizes Maurice across repeated scenes that center on people’s adoration of him, it oddly never feels like it takes inspiration from him. Maurice Flitcroft was certainly a quirky, unorthodox real-life sports figure, and yet by simply revering him for that, the film reduces itself to something that he never was: utterly conventional.
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