Oscar-winning star Mark Rylance is almost enough reason to watch new British comedy The Phantom of the Open, written by Paddington 2 scribe Simon Farnaby.
) — 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.
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.
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.
The missed opportunity is a shame, especially as there are glimpses of the full-tilt comedy struggling to escape the tea-and-crumpets sensibility.
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