Tommy’s Honour, Edinburgh International Film Festival, review: A period drama, sporting biopic and tragic love story in one

There are a lot of whiskers and sideburns and plenty of thick tweed on display in Jason Connery’s Tommy’s Honour, which opened the Edinburgh Film Festival on Wednesday night. This is a golfing movie but not one in the vein of Happy Gilmore or Tin Cup. It is a sturdy, handsomely made Scottish costume drama, set in St Andrews, Fife, in the late 1860s and early 1870s. The film tells the story of Tom Morris Sr and Tom (“Tommy”) Morris Jr, a father and son who transformed golf and won multiple British Opens.

“Are you daft? You need a mashie,” one character is told in the middle of a game. That’s a reference to a club called the niblick, not to a way of cooking potatoes.

Connery evokes an era in which players strutted the Old Course at St Andrews in heavy jackets and caps, hats and bonnets, using wooden shafted clubs to hit hand-made golf balls off very rough looking fairways onto bumpy greens.

Tom Morris Sr (Mullan) is first seen emerging from the sea as an old man. He has a magnificent, bushy beard that makes him look like a cross between Ben Gunn and an Old Testament prophet. On coming to shore after his constitutional dip, Morris is accosted by a journalist from the Times to whom he tells the story of his son, Tommy (Jack Lowden).

Tommy’s Honour, based on Kevin Cook’s book of the same name, takes a reverential approach to its subject matter. Connery and his team have gone to very great lengths to recreate the golfing world of the mid to late 19th century to the last tee, such as the way caddies carry clubs in their arms and the crowds swarm behind the players. Much of the movie is devoted to the action on the links – the endless matches, some of them very bad-tempered, between the Morris clan and their arch rivals, the Park family from Musselburgh. This may make fascinating viewing for golfing history enthusiasts but is likely to be of scant interest to a more general audience.

Thankfully, the film ventures beyond the links. Connery is also exploring Victorian-era snobbery and religious and sexual repression. St Andrews in the 1860s is portrayed as a dour, Presbyterian town. Morris Sr may be one of the finest golfers of his era, and the greatest golf-course designer, but he is not considered a gentleman. He acts as a caddy and coach for the toffs, who wager on his matches and give him some of the winnings. He is not allowed in the main clubhouse. Brash young Tommy, prodigiously gifted as a player, is far less deferential. He wants a bigger share of the winnings and is prepared to talk back to supercilious club members such as Alexander Boothby (Sam Neill, in enjoyably sneering form). Tommy doesn’t have any embarrassment, either, about courting an older woman, Meg (Ophelia Lovibond) who has a chequered past – she’s a “fornicatrix”, as the gossiping locals mutter behind her back.

As drama, Tommy’s Honour is sometimes as wayward as old Tom’s putting. It is a period drama that is also a sporting biopic with a tragic love story thrown in too for good measure. What lifts the film are the performances from Mullan as the wily, proud old father and Lowden as the headstrong son. Old Tom seems a gruff, forbidding figure, but Mullan conveys the character’s decency and his immense sense of regret at the way he feels he has let his son down. Lowden, meanwhile, captures young Tom’s rebelliousness and humour as well as his pleasure in his own prodigious ability. They bring pathos and at least some zest to a film that might have got lost in the rough without them.