The Greatest Game Ever Played - The Atlanta Journal-Constitution movie review

'The Greatest Game Ever Played' gets the details right

By ELEANOR RINGEL GILLESPIE
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

In "The Greatest Game Ever Played," actor-director Bill Paxton covers a golf tournament in ways ESPN never imagined. We get a ball's-eye view of a long drive, a la the arrow in "Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves." We stand with a player as he blanks out the gallery and reduces his world to himself and a faraway flag. A round played in a downpour not only emphasizes the almost religious hold golf has on its acolytes, but is presented in a dazzling montage of swings, umbrellas and a constantly changing leader board.

Walt Disney Pictures

'The Greatest Game Ever Played'

The verdict: This golf movie is well above par, but more importantly, it's not just about golf.

Director: Bill Paxton
Starring: Shia LaBeouf, Stephen Dillane, Justin Ashforth, Peter Firth, George Asprey
Run time: 115 minutes
Release date: Sept. 30, 2005
Rating: PG for some brief mild language.
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Paxton, whose directing debut was the eerie "Frailty," has made a film with the same clean, classic lines as the game it honors. He's taken a story line with a foregone conclusion and a sport in which the most activity occurs when someone yells "Fore!" and made it into a thrilling film.

His subject is the 1913 U.S. Open in which an unknown amateur and former caddy, 20-year-old Francis Ouimet (Shia LaBeouf), went head-to-head and hole-to-hole with Harry Vardon (Stephen Dillane), still considered the greatest pro golfer Britain ever produced.

However, as the film shows us (sometimes overshows us), the champ and the kid have something in common. Both are the "wrong" kind in a sport obsessed with the "right" kind, i.e., people of privilege and a certain lineage.

As a child, Vardon and his family were ousted from their thatched-roof hovel on the Isle of Jersey to make way for a golf course. What's golf, the boy asks. Four dour men in black answer: It's a gentleman's game and "not for the likes of you." (The memory haunts him as an adult, threatening to throw off his game).

Meanwhile, Francis grows up in Brookline, Mass., living with his poor immigrant parents — bristling dad (Elias Koteas) and gentle mom (Marnie McPhail) — in a tiny home across the street from a country club course where one occasional hazard is a herd of grazing sheep. Francis idolizes Vardon and practices putting on his bedroom's rough, uneven wood floors.

When he unexpectedly qualifies for the Open, he, too, is confronted with a gentry who know their place and expect everyone else to know theirs, too. In one amusing scene, Francis attends a fancy pre-tournament party where his caddy background helps him impersonate the upper crust. Talking with a pretty girl (a love-interest subplot that feels tacked on), he harrumphs, "Ah, yes. The Wainwrights. Good people."

Good perhaps, but not gracious. When Francis shows up with his roly-poly kiddie caddy (personable Josh Flitter), who's barely bigger than the golf bag, he's openly mocked and tittered about. But by the final playoff round, the titters have stopped.

It would be nice to see more of Vardon. Dillane is an elegant actor and his Vardon is a man with a wary dignity — someone who doesn't suffer fools gladly, but puts up with them for the love of the game. And LaBeouf shows a lot more talent than his resume ("Holes," "I, Robot") would indicate. He gives Francis a Horatio Alger earnestness, with just the right cocky edge.

The period setting proves as important as the characters and plot. Paxton takes us back to a time of corsets and carriages, of top hats and handlebar mustaches, a time when men wore ties when they made a chip shot. His attention to detail, emotional as much as physical, makes "The Greatest Game" much more than a movie about a pastime Mark Twain once called, "A good walk spoiled."