Mark Reviews Movies: THE PHANTOM OF THE OPEN

The Phantom of the Open, Sony Pictures Classics

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 2, 2022

There's a fine enough reason to admire Maurice Flitcroft, a man who took up golfing in his 40s and participated in multiple professional tournaments. If you know nothing of Flitcroft, that broad description of the man and his life might lead you to expect The Phantom of the Open to serve as an inspiring piece of sports biography—about someone who follows his dream, defies the odds, and succeeds despite all of the obstacles in his way and the skepticism aimed at him. Director Craig Roberts and screenwriter Simon Farnaby's film is that story, although in a rather peculiar and quite funny way.

It's almost a shame that the central gag of this film has to be revealed at a certain point in this review, because it's a doozy. The joke involves a long stretch of setup—both of the character and, more importantly, our own expectations of why anyone would make a movie about someone with so much working against him—and results in the kind of comic release that only comes from a lot of legwork. Indeed, it's such a great gag that the filmmakers themselves almost seem flummoxed after its arrival.

They've established their story with a certain purpose and a lot of expectations to uphold, and once that purpose and those expectations are utterly demolished, the constant attempts to keep them on track, albeit with a much different perspective, never quite feel honest. That barely matters, though, because the film remains quite funny, charming, and touching—even if it's not exactly inspiring in the ways Farnaby (adapting the non-fiction book he wrote with Scott Murray) and Roberts seem to believe it is.

Maurice is played by Mark Rylance, that ever-dependable character actor, who plays the role with equal parts goofiness and sincerity. He's a lifelong member of the working class, coming of age during World War II and passing on his youthful belief in dreaming to family he has made along the way of following a sort of destiny. His father worked in a shipyard, just as the old man's father before him, and in the small port town of Barrow-in-Furness, Maurice took a job in the yards, too, working all the way to the top—as a crane operator.

At some point, he married Jean (Sally Hawkins), a secretary at the shipyard, and became an instant father to her son Michael (Jake Davies). The couple had two twin sons, Gene and James (Christian and Jonah Lees), and after a couple decades of telling his kids that they could be and do anything they worked at, Maurice has resigned himself, quite contently, to watch his children do better than him and, hopefully, retire to a little bit of comfort one day.

All of this is played with just right touch of genuine affection by both Roberts, who offers a rush of genial exposition to Maurice's past and a real sense of familial unity in the present, and Rylance, who exudes such warmth here that there's never a question of the character's selflessness. We need that, because the story's later developments might have slipped into portraying Maurice as a joke, but as awkward and unaware as the character is once the story's gimmick really comes into play, he remains that genuinely, doggedly optimistic and generous person.

Anyway, the plot and the central joke revolve around Maurice, after learning that his job might be in danger due to recent political changes, deciding to take up golf on a complete whim, while watching a tournament broadcast on television. He knows nothing of the game, its rules and traditions, the technique to hold and swing a club, or much of anything about the sport, really. That doesn't stop him from practicing whenever he has free time or registering to compete at the 1976 British Open, marking himself down as a professional, simply because he doesn't know what a handicap is in the sport.

The film does a lot of work convincing us that all of this is heading in a particular and predictable direction, and as forewarning to those who might not want to know the truth of about Flitcroft and the filmmakers' major trick, this is the part where the big gag comes into play. It's so simple and silly that it, too, is a bit predictable, but the success and surprise of it is in just how thoroughly the film distracts us from the obvious with its heartfelt sentiment and the infectious hopefulness of its protagonist.

Maurice is—not to put too fine a point on it—terrible at golf. It's proven time and time again at this tournament, in a couple publicity stunts, and at subsequent attempts to compete with people who have spent their lives practicing and playing the game. Even with that, though, the man remains worthy of some admiration, if only because, while his devotion to such an unlikely goal may be that of a fool, it is equal parts rebellious, against all of the stuffy regulations and arrogant airs of the professional golf scene (embodied by Rhys Ifans' kill-joy head of the sport's organizing body), and ridiculous, with Maurice adopting various, ineffectual disguises to participate in more tournaments.

The film strikes a balance between the silly gag of the protagonist's persistence and the sweet sincerity of seeing him as a hero for ordinary people, even if the joke is funnier than the sentimentality is affecting. Much of that credit belongs to Rylance, who knows exactly how to make this character funny without making him pathetic. The Phantom of the Open doesn't quite sell us on the idea of this man as the inspiring figure it treats him as in the third act. As a weirdly specific kind of inspiration for those who can't but truly want to, though, he'll do.

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