Year 13, Day 92 - 4/2/21 - Movie #3,795
BEFORE: Last film with Shia LaBeouf, carrying over from "American Honey" - this grouping, and this film in particular, has been on my books for so long, I'm very happy to clear it off. I don't even care that the U.S. Open is usually played in June, or that the one in 1913 was played in September, or there are no actors from this film with birthdays today - let's just watch this movie and get rid of it already!
Tomorrow is Day 3 of TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" programming, and here's the line-up for Saturday, April 3:
THE PLOT: In the 1913 U.S. Open, 20-year-old Francis Ouimet played golf against his idol, 1900 U.S. Open champion, Englishman Harry Vardon.
AFTER: I'm just not a golf guy, I'm barely even a mini-golf guy - but hey, I watch boxing movies and I'm not a boxer or a boxing fan. So I don't have to be really into golf, every sports movie is (more or less) the same, right? They focus on the winners, or the eventual winners, or the underdogs, because who doesn't root for the underdog?
This is a true story, about Francis Ouimet, who won the U.S. Open as an amateur golfer - though the term meant something different back then, sort of. Amateur golfers came from the wealthy class, while professionals were usually former caddies who gained knowledge of the sport by working the same greens over and over. Caddies were expected to age out of the program and quit that job when they were 16. Ouimet worked as a caddy, since his family owned a house right across from the golf course in Brookline, MA - but he was not wealthy, so the golfers in both classes treated him like he didn't belong. But he'd won the Massachusetts Schoolboy Championship, so a club member and the club caddiemaster had him play a round of golf to see if he was good enough to play in the U.S. Amateur, and if this film is to believed, he just missed qualifying for the U.S. Open.
The whole pursuit of golf put him at odds with his father (Shia LaBeouf may have settled things with his father, but his character in this 2005 apparently also had some big daddy issues) because he'd wasted $50 on the entry fee, and $50 was a lot of money back in 1913. So he agreed to go work in a sporting goods store, to earn money to help support his family. Basically he was retired from playing golf, washed up at the age of 20. But a visit from the president of the U.S.G.A. to his store got him back in the game, into the U.S. Open, but then forced by his father to move out of the family home.
The favorites to win the U.S. Open that year were British golfers Harry Vardon and Ted Ray - Vardon had won the Open before, and he was Ouimet's golf idol. The two had met once before, when Ouimet was a small boy and Vardon was giving a golfing demonstation in downtown Boston. It's a bit odd that throughout the tournament, Ouimet never mentions to Vardon that they'd met before - I guess it doesn't really matter, what celebrity athlete remembers every little kid they meet along the way?
They didn't really develop Vardon's character that well, all we really learn about him is that when he was a boy, some men in black robes came to his house and informed his family that they had to vacate, because the land was going to be turned into a golf course. This event, again, if this film is to be believed, haunted Vardon as an adult, and he frequently had visions of those men in black. I guess we all have our demons, and athletes meet them every day on the field of play? This shouldn't really count as character exposition, because it's all speculative, but I suppose if we the audience knew too much about Vardon then we might root for him, and clearly we're supposed to root for the American amateur.
Ouimet loses his caddy because he can't pay for one, like the other amateurs can, so he ends up using a 10-year old boy, the brother of a close friend. The question then becomes, can this unlikely pairing of skilled amateur and tiny caddy compete with the big boys, come from behind against impossible odds to tie the match and force a playoff round? Well, come on, it is a sports movie, so what do you think? Never bet against the central underdog character. To his credit, Vardon, as a former amateur himself, doesn't pull rank or look down upon Ouimet, and claims that if the young Bostonian wins, then he'd fully deserve it, and Vardon vows to take the loss with grace.
Now, there are some deviations from the real history, namely that in real life, Ouimet won the Massachusetts Amateur in 1913, while here he just misses qualifying for it. He did lose in the quarterfinals of the U.S. Amateur, but that was held on Long Island, not in Brookline MA. But shortly after that loss he was asked by the president of the USGA to play in the U.S. Open, and this is where the movie comes back in line with reality. That year, the U.S. Open was delayed from June until mid-September, to allow both Vardon and Ray to play in it. And as a result, the event was therefore moved to the Country Club in Brookline, which was the course that Ouimet knew the best - I think the film sort of downplayed the importance of this home-field advantage, Ouimet probably walked this course hundreds of times as a caddy, but we can't exactly say how much this factored into his victory. But I'm guessing, it was a lot.
The film also took a little license by having Ouimet win by just one stroke - I'm not sure why the truth here wouldn't be more impressive. Sure, that produces a nail-biter here, but it also sells Ouiment short at the same time - is that fair? Ouimet gets credit for creating a lot of interest in golf, by showing what's possible for an amateur to do - 10 years later, the number of golfers in the U.S. had tripled, and same goes for the number of courses. If not for him, would it be a billion-dollar sponsored industry today, or would it be more of a fringe sport, like Ultimate Frisbee or beer pong?
Ouimet never officially went pro, he tried to remain an amateur, while running a sporting goods business, but the USGA stripped him of amateur status, arguing that by selling golf equipment, he was profiting from the sport and therefore a professional. But after he served in the Army during World War I, they quietly reinstated him as an amateur - he won the U.S. Amateur again in 1931, but lost several matches during the 1920's to Bobby Jones. Damn, there's a movie about Bobby Jones, too, now I'll have to decide whether to add that one to my watchlist, also. Since I never know which films I'll need to make my linking happen, I guess I should, better safe than sorry...
NITPICK POINT: Is this REALLY the way that the scoreboards used to work, back before there were electronic ones? According to this, they hung little white squares of wood on pegs, that's 18 squares of wood for each golfer, one for each hole played. But it seems like the golfers moved up and down in the rankings quite frequently, so that meant that each golfer's name needed to be moved when he rose up or down, along with every other square of wood for each hole played up to that point? How is that efficient? There had to be a team of guys doing nothing but moving little squares of wood around, then they had to do it all AGAIN after the next hole. Didn't they have, like, chalkboard technology back in 1913? Wouldn't that just be easier, to erase each golfer's name and write it in again, along with all the scores for each hole played? Now I see why electronic scoreboards HAD to be invented, this just seems like way too much work.
Also starring Stephen Dillane (last seen in "The Professor and the Madman"), Peter Firth (last seen in "MI-5"), Elias Koteas (last seen in "Some Kind of Wonderful"), Luke Askew (last seen in "Frailty"), Josh Flitter (last seen in "Nancy Drew"), Peyton List (last seen in "Playing It Cool"), Marnie McPhail, Len Cariou (last seen in "Death Wish"), Michael Sinelnikoff, Stephen Marcus (last seen in "Angela's Ashes"), Max Kasch (last seen in "Still Waiting..."), Mike Nahrgang, Walter Massey, Justin Ashforth, Jonathan Higgins (last seen in "Race"), Matthew Knight, Robin Wilcock, Nicolas Wright (last seen in "Independence Day: Resurgence"), Danette MacKay, George Asprey (last seen in "The Gentlemen"), Scott Faulconbridge, Luke Kirby (last seen in "Glass"), Tim Peper, James Bradford, Michael Weaver (last seen in "The Slammin' Salmon"), Dennis St. John, Jeremy Thibodeau, Johnny Griffin, with a cameo from Joe Jackson.
RATING: 5 out of 10 tiny pencils
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