The mid-70s were weird. If a spectral Englishman could appear on Soul Train and a Southern peanut farmer could win the 39th presidency, then why couldn't a middle-aged crane driver from Barrow-in-Furness pass himself off as a professional golfer and compete in the British Open, despite having zero experience and even less talent?
That's the unlikely charade behind The Phantom of the Open, the latest in the seemingly never-ending stream of feel-good, based-on-a-true-story films cranked out by the British in recent years, in which an eccentric working-class underdog invariably becomes a folk hero by capturing the attention of a nation.
Done well, as in the late Roger Michell's art heist comedy The Duke, it can be a winning formula. But Phantom, directed by Craig Roberts from a script by Paddington 2 writer Simon Farnaby, shows what happens when that formula isn't finessed; when a film is allowed to drift into saccharine homilies at the expense of dramatic tension. It's what the current parlance might call — shudder — 'nicecore'.
We first meet the aging Maurice Flitcroft — played by Oscar-winning oddball Mark Rylance (Bridge of Spies) — in one of those career wraparound interviews that immediately tells the audience a little bit more than it needs to know. He's on American television sometime in the 80s, where his notoriously inept golfing has become a cult human interest item. The questions roll but all he wants is a cup of tea, with six sugars — and if that joke's your, well, cup of tea, then you're probably going to have a swell time.
Back in the early 70s, Flitcroft is working as a crane operator for a shipyard in far-flung north-west England, near the Scottish border, where he's settled in a modest existence with wife Jean (Sally Hawkins, milking that Spencer bowl cut for all it's worth), her grown son from a prior relationship (Jake Davies), and their twin teenage boys (Christian and Jonah Lees).
With the shipyard about to be privatised and Maurice out of a job, he decides — at the urging of his wife – that it's time to explore his dreams. One night, he's inexplicably transfixed by a round of golf on television and, against all odds, it becomes his obsession — a scene staged as fantastical hallucination, with our wide-eyed protagonist tumbling into a starry night sky and around a golf-ball-shaped moon, like Baron Munchausen soaring over the back nine.
Though it's his third feature behind the lens, actor-turned-director Roberts is probably still better known to audiences as the star of Richard Ayoade's charming coming-of-age debut, Submarine. Like that film, he has a light comedic touch and feel for the milieu he's sketching, giving us a mid-70s that feels authentically uncool: three TV channels; ABBA and Leo Sayer on the soundtrack; white people in overalls dancing to disco at dinky community halls — a world where nothing, and thus everything, seems possible.
Montages of Maurice butting heads with the stuffy establishment (led by Rhys Ifans's suitably villainous-sounding secretary of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews) ensue, where Roberts gets some comic mileage from the familiar targets — lampooning the entitlement of the game and finding amusement in its many ridiculous, archaic rules.
Soon enough the bumbling Northerner is competing in the qualifying round of the 1976 Open — where his infamous round of 121 becomes the championship's all-time worst score, and his legend is born.
The idea that someone so completely terrible at their passion might go on to be an inspiration is a rich premise, even if there's something vaguely discomfiting about the film's celebration of a man who more or less drives his family into poverty — and whose 11th-hour shout-out to his long-suffering wife, the mostly underused Hawkins, feels like cynical, borderline-misogynist writing.
But there's an enervating twee-ness to the screenplay by English writer-comedian Farnaby (adapting his and Scott Murray's book of the same name), a sense that the British feel-good formula has been fed into an algorithm that hasn't yet machine-learned the art of dramatic rhythm. (Farnaby's ultimate paean to politeness, Paddington 2, for all its insufferable online fandom, at least had the good sense to include dramatic conflict.)
The missed opportunity is a shame, especially as there are glimpses of the full-tilt comedy struggling to escape the tea-and-crumpets sensibility.
Over the next decade, Flitcroft would continue in his attempts to enter the Open in a series of more outlandish identities, and the sight of Maurice in flagrantly fake disguises suggests an Andy Kaufman-like put-on that a more imaginative film might have indulged.
At times, Roberts seems to have considered just that — there are enough giddy whip pans and dolly ins to suggest the director seemed to think he was making a slippery, Scorsese-esque tale of irony and ambition.
What the movie does have, and what just about makes it worth the price of admission, is Rylance, who's quietly become one of movies' most fascinating and unsettling presences. The English actor's socially maladjusted tech overlords in Steven Spielberg's Ready Player One and Adam McKay's Don't Look Up are among the more memorable turns in recent pop cinema, and he brings that sense of spaced-out other-worldliness to his performance here, making Flitcroft feel less like a naive Northerner than an extraterrestrial in a constant state of wonder at the human form it's inhabiting.
The dissonance gives The Phantom of the Open what passes for a point of curiosity, with Rylance getting at something — some essential derangement, whether from trauma, mental illness, or a childhood dream quashed — that the script can't conjure, in a film that seems to be happening beyond the frame, where only he can see it.
Rylance connects to the contradictions in Maurice's childlike mind; to his dreamy optimism and his neglect of responsibility — elements that the film hints at but can't quite reconcile, because it's too enamoured with its warm-blanket world view.
The Phantom of the Open is in cinemas now.
