Fun, good-natured and schmaltzy: Phantom of the Open reviewed

Phantom of the Open is a comedy-drama telling a true story that would have to be true as no one would believe it. The subject is Maurice Flitcroft, a crane operator who took up golf at 46 after seeing it on the telly and entered the British Open in 1976, achieving the highest score ever. (‘Does that mean he’s won?’, asked his wife.) Dubbed ‘the world’s worst golfer’, he then hoaxed his way into further Opens, much to the incandescent rage of the snobbish authorities, and you’ll be rooting for him, of course. This is a British underdog film like The Duke – but with some Eddie the Eagle mixed in – and it’s fun and enjoyable and good-natured even if it does play it safe and waltz off into Hallmark schmaltz at the end. Best of all, though, it stars Mark Rylance and Sally Hawkins which means it’s immeasurably better than it might have been. (I can’t put a precise figure on this but would guess it’s around 87 per cent better.)

The film is directed by Craig Roberts and written by Simon Farnaby who co-wrote a book about Flitcroft, co-wrote Paddington 2, and who, as an actor, you will recognise from the Horrible Histories troupe. It opens with Flitcroft (Rylance, beset by a set of dentures) about to give a TV interview and asking for his usual refreshment – ‘tea, six sugars’ – before it flashes back to his childhood and his evacuation to a grand Scottish estate. Here, he read books and learned the violin and was told he could be anything. But he’s a working-class boy and after the war it’s back to Barrow-in-Furness and his true destiny. That is, working in the shipyards because that’s what his father did and his father’s father and so on.