Charming tale of yet another Brit underdog
Another week, another film about a quirky British underdog who does something rather weird and wonderful.
This time it’s not about a Newcastle pensioner holding a mega-valuable masterpiece to ransom in the cause of free TV licences for OAPS.
No, it’s even stranger than that: the tale of a crane driver in a north-western shipyard who decides that he wants to take part in the British Open despite never having played golf before – and despite, clearly, being completely useless.
Once again, it’s a true tale – though inevitably you wonder just how much embroidery has embellished its truth. But one thing’s for sure, it’s an utterly undemanding, thoroughly charming feel-good movie. The evocation of the times, the late 1970s, is superb, with the clothes, the interiors, the sense of what’s right and wrong, and in the middle of it all is Maurice Flitcroft – terrific from Mark Rylance – as the man whose biography (on which this is based) is subtitled The World’s Worst Golfer.
He’s worked hard all his life to bring up his stepson and his own twin sons, and when the world starts to move on, with the possibility of redundancy, his devoted wife Jean (lovely again from Sally Hawkins) urges him that it is his time now, to do something for himself.
Catching some golf on TV, he’s suddenly a man on a mission, intent on proving that the British Open really is open – despite the sniffiness of the local golf club and all its self-preserving snobbery.
He really is in a new world; when his wife is filling in the application form, they agree that this is where they mention his false teeth when they get to the bit about his handicap. And yet he is undaunted, especially not when he hits the worst ever round in the British Open’s history. He’s a cheery, simple soul, slightly hesitant, ever modest and always looking on the bright side.
As he says, he wants to see life as an “oyster” rather than a “barnacle”, that he wants his children to dream. In an engaging dynamic, his twins are chips off the old block, aiming for the stars and reaching them as champion disco dancers. Inevitably, they embrace their dad’s ethic. Not so his step son, who’s gone over to the dark side, joining the management team at the shipyard and feeling acutely every last bit of the embarrassment his dad is incapable of feeling for himself.
The point is, especially, if you’re a Brit, there’s only one thing better than winning (and heaven knows we have precious little experience of that) and it’s losing (where we undoubtedly lead the field). And as the film goes on, so Maurice’s smiling incompetence slowly turns into his defining virtue. Far better to be a cheery loser than a snarling winner, the film implies – and in the last third of the film, he gets his apotheosis on the other side of the Pond when the Americans latch on to just what it means to be the heroic also-ran. It’s a gentle film which arguably says a lot less about anything than The Duke did a couple of weeks ago. It’s probably not going to be the most memorable film you’ll watch this year, but it might just be among the most enjoyable. Sweet indeed from Rylance; sweeter still from Hawkins.