Release Date: April 30, 2004
Starring: James Caviezel, Claire Forlani, Jeremy Northam, Malcolm McDowell, Brett Rice, Connie Ray
Directed by: Rowdy Herrington
Written by: Rowdy Herrington, Bill Pryor
Distributed by: Film Foundry Releasing
MPAA Rating: PG (language)
A viewer’s take on Bobby Jones: Stroke of Genius, a long-winded but tender biopic about the legendarily successful golfer Bobby Jones, probably depends on whether one subscribes to the assertion that golf really is the grand old game. If so, then Bobby Jones will strike that reverential chord that reverberates within golfers the same way baseball enthusiasts reminisce about Sandy Koufax or football enthusiasts about Vince Lombardi. If not, then this film, which is directed by Rowdy Herrington and written by Herrington and Bill Pryor, will seem more of a snooze than the game itself.
It begins with an almost scatterbrained approach to its hero, unsure of how to introduce the great Jones in the same way that a fan, given the lifelong dream of an opportunity to meet his idol, will struggle for the right words to mark the occasion. It finally settles on Jones’s youth in Atlanta (he is played as a young boy by Devon Gearhart, as a teenager by Thomas Lewis, and, for most of the picture, as an adult by Jim Caviezel), when he turned to golf, it seems, as a last resort -- he was too sickly and underweight to play baseball with the other boys, for example. But the picture offers little hint of how Jones accumulated his extraordinary talent; it takes it for granted that Jones was perhaps endowed with skill from birth, as though mentioning it might ruin the mystique.
Jones, rather, is depicted by the movie as a man with two dimensions: a tightly-wound disposition and a penchant for self-sacrifice, both of which feel as bland and removed as the movie’s overall portrait of its hero but are supposed to make his accomplishments on the golf course all the more outstanding. Jones famously played as an amateur for his entire career and just as famously won all four of the sport’s major championships -- the U.S. Open, the British Open, the U.S. Amateur Open, and the British Amateur Open -- in a single year, 1930, before retiring at age 28. It is a feat still unequaled in the game today, and the movie frequently implies that Jones won the tournaments not for himself but to please his father (Brett Rice), then retired at the behest of his wife, Clara (Claire Forlani), and, throughout it all, earned degrees in mechanical engineering from Harvard and in law from Emory to please his mother (Connie Ray).
Whether or not any of this is true is beside the point. Jones was the greatest golfer of his time (and, with the possible exception of Jack Nicklaus, the greatest of all time), and that he would win all four majors seems inevitable rather than exciting. In fact, it seems as though director Herrington is so determined to pit Jones against himself -- he’s frequently shown hurling clubs and shouting epithets in frustration after bad shots -- because no other golfer could hold his own against Jones. But a man battling his own demons is a much more difficult proposition, narratively speaking, and from the way Herrington relapses to the same shots over and over again (Jones sending a blistering drive whistling down the fairway; or pitching an impossible lob shot out of a sand trap; or sinking a twisting, rolling putt from 50 feet or more), it’s clear he’s not up to the task.
The only player who came close to challenging Jones was Walter Hagen (Jeremy Northam), who is one of the movie’s two most charismatic characters (and actors). Like the other, the sportswriter O.B. Keeler (Malcolm McDowell), Northam’s Hagen is unfortunately reduced to a bit part, occasionally popping up to take part in a spirited, professional rivalry with Jones. One of the reasons that Northam gets so little screen time could be that he outshines the picture’s star, Caviezel, by several orders of magnitude; when Hagen and Jones play golf together, Northam makes Caviezel look as stiff as a seven iron. Worse, Caviezel looks unsure of himself when Northam comes around.
He is better suited to sharing the screen with McDowell, whose O.B. Keeler befriends Jones in a kind of surrogate father-son relationship. McDowell, who is English, nevertheless has a wonderfully gravelly delivery, and he has some of the most well written lines in the film. “In case you hadn’t noticed,” Keeler tells Jones on the morning of a match, “you’re the best golfer in the world. And when you get that through your head, you’re not just going to win one tournament. You’re going to win them all.” If the movie had focused on this relationship, or even the one between Jones and Hagen, it would probably have been much more dramatic and lively.
Bobby Jones is at its best when it’s on the golf course, even though Herrington quickly uses up his bag of tricks and is forced to resort to many of the same shots several times over. But there is a kind of thrilling anticipation to the first tee shot in golf, the same as with the first pitch of a baseball game or the kickoff in football, and Herrington makes the most of it. Thanks to the Tom Stern cinematography and the James Horner score, the film manages to give the game of golf a stately, elegant feel, while at the same time relishing its Scottish origins. Horner’s score is heavy with drums and bagpipes (invoking the work he did on Braveheart and The Perfect Storm), and in dialogue, characters frequently celebrate the Old Course at St. Andrew’s the way players today talk about Augusta National (which Jones designed upon his retirement). “They were playing golf here when they still thought the world was flat,” one character says.
The movie does get interesting when it turns to the subject of amateurs and professionals; Jones, having played so successfully in so short a time, could’ve easily made piles of money. But this was at a time when playing sports for money was relatively unheard-of, enough so that the sportswriter Keeler can say with great disdain, “Money is going to ruin sports.” In other films this might seem overly clever, but Bobby Jones has a fine sense of period detail, clearly portraying Jones’s times as a simpler one. Compared with today’s postured, manicured world of professional golf, it might seem strange to see Jones and Hagen smoking cigarettes on the course, or players windmilling clubs over the gallery in anger, but in truth at the time it was still just a game, and not a multimillion-dollar entertainment extravaganza.
Still, Jones is famous enough that he has appeared in the movies before, and most recently in the 2000 golf drama The Legend of Bagger Vance. In that film, Jones (played by Joel Gretsch), Hagen (Bruce McGill), and Rannulph Junuh (Matt Damon), a local champ from Savannah, Georgia, play four rounds of golf in what is billed as the most extraordinary exhibition match ever played. Shortly before the final round, in an empty clubhouse, Jones confides in Junuh that he is retiring, to which an incredulous Junuh replies that Jones is at the top of his game -- how can he quit? Jones cites his wife and family and law practice, and then says: “It’s just a game, Junuh. It’s time to stop.” In Bagger Vance, Jones is depicted as cool, aloof, and perfect, the Iceman to Junuh’s Maverick. But the heartbreaking sincerity of those nine words, a startling moment of humanity in the golfing great, is more life than exists in any half-hour of Bobby Jones: Stroke of Genius -- which leads one to believe that in a successful biopic, it is better to cherish the subject than to deify him.
-- Craig Roush (craigroush@hotmail.com)