There’s a whole lot of niceness in the air. Pop culture has seen a substantial influx of wildly popular stories that seek to uplift the spirit by showing kind people doing kind things, kindly. CODA won Best Picture, Ted Lasso swept the Emmys, Everything Everywhere All at Once is the box office underdog of the year. Bob Ross and Fred Rogers have become iconic saints decades after their worldly departures. Most Disney animated projects are about like-minded people teaming up to selflessly overcome situational conflict, abandoning villains all together. Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of cynical, cruel pieces of art and entertainment that you can seek out if you’re willing and able. But there’s a burgeoning movement of audiences who want to see nice characters be nice to each other with minimal conflict –– a movement that’s made Paddington 2 an early frontrunner for the internet’s favorite movie of the century.
But not every nice movie can attain the blissful heights of Paddington 2 –– even if Sally Hawkins is in the cast and Simon Farnaby wrote the screenplay, as proven by The Phantom of the Open, an inspirational British golf comedy about following your dreams. The film tells the mostly-true story of Maurice Flitcroft (Mark Rylance), a crane operator who decides to participate in the British Open and records the worst score in tournament history. He has a supportive wife (Sally Hawkins), a pair of disco-obsessed twin sons (Christian and Jonah Lees), and a fuddy-duddy stepson (Jake Davies) who wants to be an Important Businessman.
This setup inspires very little substantial conflict –– most of the film’s tension derives from the dramatic irony of knowing Flitcroft is an abysmal golfer without him recognizing his own lack of skill. Much like Rocky or Eddie the Eagle, it’s a sports movie centered around a man who cannot win the competition, but wins the moral and spiritual battles by showing up at all. Maurice doesn’t fundamentally change throughout the course of the movie –– instead, he’s a relentless force for good who causes the people around him to change for the better. Director Craig Roberts –– best known for his acting performances in films like Submarine and The Fundamentals of Caring –– approaches the material with an appropriately light touch, imbuing upbeat montages with Scorsese-esque whip pans and hummable pop soundtracking. The peak of his stylization comes at a couple moments of charming surrealism where the film visualizes Maurice’s passion as colorful fantasy dreamscapes, where the moon turns into an enormous golf ball and the hero flies through a Van Gogh-inspired starry night.
Rylance has made a post-Oscar career of being the most forgettable part of prominent movies: he turns up for sizable but unflashy roles in Dunkirk, The Trial of the Chicago 7, Ready Player One, and Don’t Look Up. He tends to quietly putter around the screen, inserting unpredictable mid-word pauses and slurred syllables into his line deliveries that make his characters seem small but unfazeable. Here, he does all that again, but bigger and for more time. His character talks almost exclusively in middle school yearbook quotes –– “Practice is the road to perfection,” “Love your mistakes,” “Pick all the flowers you can while you’re still young” –– and Rylance does his best to imbue them with a certain soulfulness that they don’t possess on paper, succeeding about half the time.
Nothing in particular is wrong with the film –– it’s just so simple and slight that it has the moral and intellectual aspirations of most entertainment directed at four-year-olds. It is earnest, broad, silly, and fundamentally unconcerned with appearing cool in any sense of the word. While there is very little about the film that is particularly remarkable, I admire its spirit nonetheless.
