Swing and a miss
WORLD’S WORST GOLFER MAKES IT INTO BRITISH OPEN AND ON TO BIG SCREEN
LEIGH PAATSCH THE PHANTOM OF THE OPEN (M) Director: Craig Roberts (Eternal Beauty) Starring: Mark Rylance, Sally Hawkins, Rhys Ifans. Rating: ★★★☆☆ From green to screen, many swings and misses
This wryly amusing – and sometimes, oddly touching – movie is based on the 2010 sports biography The Phantom of the Open: Maurice Flitcroft, The World’s Worst Golfer.
The title of that book is unerringly accurate when it comes to the unflattering description of its subject.
However, the screen version of the life and times of Maurice Flitcroft takes a credible shot at pitching this champion of chumps as a figure of inspiration, and not just fun.
Flitcroft (played by Bridge Of Spies Oscar-winner Mark Rylance) had a personal mantra he often loved to quote to anyone who showed the faintest sign of listening: “Practice is the road to perfection”.
While that is indeed true, it was not practice – or for that matter, any semblance of golfing ability – that sneaked the middle-aged Manchester dockside worker into the qualifying line-up of the prestigious British Open in 1976.
Instead, the crafty Flitcroft found an obscure loophole in the tournament’s entry procedure that no one had ever really noticed before. So despite never having played a full round of golf in his life, Maurice Flitcroft hauled an incomplete set of mail-order clubs past an incredulous gaggle of officials to take his rightful place on the greens.
Other first-timers that year included future Spanish golf icon Seve Ballesteros, who shared a locker room with Flitcroft on the fateful day in question. In a matter of hours, Maurice had both posted a record high score for a round of Open golf (121, if you’re wondering) and created a legend that endures to this day.
The movie folksily fills in the blanks of the Flitcroft biography by having us spend plenty of quality time with his totally supportive wife Jean (Sally Hawkins) and their clearly conflicted children.
(Remarkably, two of the Flitcroft kids – identical twins, actually – were inspired by their dad’s deeds to become a professional disco dancing duo. Just like Maurice’s mangled round of golf, this actually did happen.)
There will be some who feel that The Phantom of the Open plays it too cute for its own good, particularly when it comes to Rylance’s very mannered performance.
However, the closing credits (with its footage of the real Maurice Flitcroft) reveal that Rylance’s depiction of this crafty eccentric is spot-on all the way through. The Phantom of the Open is in cinemas now.
FALLING FOR FIGARO (M) Rating: ★★★☆☆
This musically inclined rom-com is not here to change the way any feel-good games are played on film. Nevertheless, when the time comes for the movie to make a little magic happen between its seemingly mismatched lead couple, the job is done both cheerily and effectively.
Australian star Danielle Macdonald (Patti Cake$, Dumplin’) plays Millie, a Londoner who turns her back on a multimillion-dollar career in high finance to chase her dream of becoming an opera singer.
Not entirely familiar with how to go about it, Millie ends up getting a highly unorthodox crash course in world-class vocalising from Meghan (Joanna Lumley), a down-and-out diva living in the Scottish Highlands. It is here Millie must remain for a year, dodging the insults and blunt objects hurled at her, while also slowly falling for the only other student on Meghan’s books, a local handyman named Max (Hugh Skinner).
Sure, this set-up plays out just about as predictably as feared (or hoped!) but never to the point of getting on anyone’s nerves. Oh, and the opera selections on the soundtrack are right on the money (shout-out to Australian singers Stacey Alleaume and Nathan Lay, who dubbed in the singing voices of Macdonald and Skinner). General release
PERSUASION (PG) Rating: ★★★☆☆
Not everybody is going to like this fresh take on Jane Austen’s last completed book. However, those who do succumb to its considerable, if angular, charms will be certain to love it to death.
The massive cross-generational Austen fanbase is bound to be divided by the new movie’s choice of storytelling voice. While heavyhearted heroine of the hour Anne Elliot (a radiant Dakota Johnson) is granted the honour of narrating her own story, she does so by “breaking the fourth wall” and speaking direct to the audience (a la Phoebe Waller-Bridge in her acclaimed series Fleabag).
These many asides are beautifully handled by Johnson, and the humour propelling them is sweetly sarcastic, but never mean. However, it will be enough to have the Austen purists up in arms for such liberties being taken with their fave author.
As it stands, the movie works through Anne’s highly complicated (and painfully unrequited) love life in a detailed and playful manner that does full justice to the original text.
Co-starring Cosmo Jarvis as Anne’s irresistible ex Wentworth, Henry Golding as her dodgy cousin, and Richard E. Grant as her irrationally immodest dad. Premieres on Netflix July 15