The Greatest Game Ever Played

A sports film set in America. Francis Ouimet grows up near Boston. His father is an immigrant labourer and there is no money at home. There is a golf club across the road. The boy caddies there. He learns the game by watching. Then he plays in secret. The club will not have him as a member. The line is plain: those who play on the course and those who serve them. The national open is held in 1913. Harry Vardon comes from England. The best player of the period, himself out of a poor family. Francis is entered at the last moment. He needs a caddie. The one he finds is a ten-year-old boy: Eddie Lowery. From there the film is the tournament itself. Hole by hole, round by round. The weather is bad. Most of the championship is played in rain and the course is mud. Vardon has a line of his own. As a child he watched a golf course built over the land his family's house stood on, and he has not felt he belongs there since. What the narrative is interested in is not golf but class: all its tension comes from neither player ever being fully accepted by the men inside the club. The tournament ends level and a play-off is held the next day. Eddie Lowery's line is the best thing in it. The boy talks constantly on the course and the film's humour comes from him. The production carries the Disney name and the tone follows; no hardness, no fracture. Bill Paxton directs and uses computer assistance to visualise the game: the ball's path, the wind, and the player's mind are shown. Shia LaBeouf, Stephen Dillane, Josh Flitter and Peter Firth are in the cast. Who it is for: anyone who likes sports films based on real events and family films. Who it is not for: anyone looking for complexity; the good and the bad are marked from the start and the narrative surprises nowhere.