The Phantom of the Open
Mark Rylance plays a true-life British eccentric in which audacity struggles to count as some kind of victory.
Hazards on the fairway: Mark Rylance and son
In 1976, Maurice Flitcroft achieved the highest score in British golfing history. Which, if you know golf, is not a good thing. Yet thanks to a clerical slip-up, Flitcroft – a crane operator from Barrow-in-Furness – managed to compete in the qualifying round of The Open and, with his score of 121, became a national joke. Nonetheless, he remained undaunted and pursued his ambition to make his mark in the gentlemen’s game by any means possible…
The popularity of golf as a cinema attraction has followed along Maurice Flitcroft lines, with even Will Smith and Matt Damon failing to draw significant crowds to their golf-themed The Legend of Bagger Vance. So it’s a brave director, indeed, to tackle both the sport and a story of failure.
Craig Roberts’ The Phantom of the Open comes across like a feel-good fantasy - but without the good bit. Even so, Flitcroft was anything if not indomitable, and chutzpah would seem to have its own rewards. “Practice is the road to perfection,” his violin teacher told him and the phrase became his mantra. He wasn’t a very good violin player either.
Craig Roberts has always been drawn to the offbeat, to a sort of malfunctioning temperament tucked away in the less salubrious corners of the British Isles. The Phantom of the Open is his most mainstream feature to date (and the most sentimental), with a strong cast headed by Mark Rylance, Sally Hawkins and Rhys Ifans. Having added a dentally comic idiosyncrasy to his tech billionaire in Don’t Look Up, Rylance now goes full hog with Flitcroft’s ill-fitting dentures, which, along with his arthritis and lumbago, are just three of his handicaps (but not of the golfing kind). However, his misfit here is more of a caricature than a character, with the teeth doing much of the heavy lifting.
Essentially, The Phantom of the Open is one of those stranger-than-fiction tales in which human endeavour surmounts the odds. But one should love the people involved, and in spite of a respectable cast, not one actor really registers on a human level. Sally Hawkins has become Roberts’ muse (she played his mum in Submarine and Jane Eyre, and starred in his Eternal Beauty), but she’s merely presented here as a sounding board for Flitcroft’s foolishness, an archetypal long-suffering pillar of the family. Others, such as Rhys Ifans and Steve Oram, play their comic notes as broadly as they’re allowed. Not that there isn’t much to entertain – there are the familiar nods to Sixties’ and Seventies’ nostalgia, along with all the hit tunes – and there’s the loopiness of the narrative. Of course, everybody is a weirdo in their own way, but Flitcroft was bonkers in the public eye.
JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Cast: Mark Rylance, Sally Hawkins, Mark Lewis Jones, Christian Lees, Jonah Lees, Jake Davies, Johann Myers, Sadao Ueda, Tim Steed, Ash Tandon, Rhys Ifans, Afsaneh Dehrouyeh, Nigel Betts, Simon Farnaby.
Dir Craig Roberts, Pro Tom Miller, Nichola Martin and Kate Glover, Screenplay Simon Farnaby, based on the biography The Phantom of the Open: Maurice Flitcroft, The World's Worst Golfer, by Simon Farnaby and Scott Murray, Ph Kit Fraser, Pro Des Sarah Finlay, Ed Jonathan Amos, Music Isobel Waller-Bridge, Costumes Sian Jenkins, Dialect coach Martin McKellan.
Ingenious/Water & Power/Baby Cow Films/BBC Film/Cornerstone Films/BFI-Entertainment One.
106 mins. UK. 2021. Rel: 18 March 2022. Cert. 12A.
