AMERICA seems to have the monopoly on sports films, at least the good ones. Innumerable films about baseball, boxing and American football have reproduced the country’s passion for sport in such a way that there’s a sort of universal romance in it.
The rest of the world’s filmmakers have never had the same knack. Senna, Asif Kapadia’s recent, wondrous documentary about the racing driver Ayrton Senna was an exception rather than the rule when it comes to British sports films. English soccer films are dire.
Sadly, Tommy’s Honour doesn’t buck the trend. Jason Connery’s film is about the sport that the country invented – golf. So it certainly feels like the right fit, and appropriately opened last year’s Edinburgh Film Festival. But despite sterling performances and a poignant, real-life tragedy, it’s a film that feels stuck in the rough more than it does a hole in one.
Based on the book of the same name, it concerns the father and son who dominated the early days of the professional sport in Scotland in the late-1800s. “Old Tom Morris” (Peter Mullan) was golfer, caddy, clubmaker and course designer, and the man sometimes referred to as “the grand old man of golf”. His son “Young Tommy Morris” (Jack Lowden) was an even better golfer, and remains the youngest winner of the Open in its history.
Their story is one of talent and innovation, and also class. This was a period when the well-to-do “gentlemen” who owned the courses treated the golfers as highly-skilled serfs, giving them a mere fraction of the profits. Despite his accomplishments, Tom Snr is tied to tradition and too ready to doff his cap to his employers; Tom Jnr is determined to play for his own reward, not theirs.
So there’s plenty of interest here: tensions between father and son, between mother and son over Jnr’s choice of wife, Meg (Ophelia Lovibond), and between Jnr and the Establishment, personified by Sam Neill’s exploitative and narrow-minded golf club owner.
Connery also offers an occasionally rum depiction of the sport’s early days – the rough-hewn courses, the insistence on playing whatever the weather (including heavy snow), the frequent brawls between rival fans, the fact that golfers played with their jackets on.
So Tommy’s Honour has plenty of good intentions. It also features the excellent Scottish pairing of old hand Mullan, exuding taciturn integrity beneath his extravagant Victorian beard (the first shot, of the actor emerging out of the sea like Poseidon, is probably the best in the film), and Lowden, hugely charismatic and likeable as the decent, dashing, ambitious golfing star, who was becoming a legend in his own lifetime before tragedy struck.
What prevents all of this from soaring are the stodgy script and direction. While Tommy’s love affair with Meg gives the story it’s pathos, it’s too dominant and way too saccharine; you’d find more drama at a crazy-golf course than in the matches here, which seems anathema to a film about golf; and there is no sense of the breath-taking grandeur that the Scottish locations ought to afford.
Though some may feel that golf, like snooker, darts or tennis hardly offers the makings of an exciting film, it’s worth recalling Tin Cup. This 1996 romantic comedy starred Kevin Costner (perhaps the king of sports movies, he also starred in the essential Field oO Dreams and Bull Durham) and was funny, sexy, visually expansive and dramatic. How ironic that a Hollywood fiction should capture the excitement of a sport more keenly than a film based on real life and so respectful of its origins.
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