The greatest game ever played!

Talk about exaggeration- and the title of this movie epitomises it!
One of the key ways of making sports movies successful is to have an underdog as the main protagonist who basically kills the ego of the champion by beating him at the game; the contrast between the champion and the underdog is stark and the audience roots for the underdog all along.
This movie is different, and refreshingly so in that sense.

The movie traces the parallel lives of the main competitors in the 1913 USOpen, the British professional Harry Vardon (Stephen Dillane) and the American amateur Francis Ouimet (Shia LaBeouf). In spite of their differences in age and nationality, Vardon and Ouimet both came from modest backgrounds, a fact that gives the film a jolt of class consciousness.

Vardon, who grew up poor on the Channel island of Jersey, is treated with condescension by the London establishment and denied membership in the club that sponsors him. Ouimet, the child of immigrants, learns golf while caddying at the country club across the street from his family's house in Brookline. (His own caddy later on is a street urchin named Eddie, played by a natural scene-stealer named Josh Flitter.) Ouimet's father (Elias Koteas), a laborer, sees the game as a waste of time, but Francis's mother (Marnie McPhail) indulges her son's passion and encourages him, as someone in a movie like this must, to follow his dream.

This following of the dream against all odds is what I like most about the movie. Ouimet doesn't just dream, he works hard, reads Vardon's book about what makes a golfer great, and practices and practices till he is able to perfect his game. We also get a glimse of what makes champions great- they have an uncanny ability to concentrate on their goal and cut out all the 'noise' surrounding them. They just concentrate on what they have to do with single minded devotion.
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This is not the greatest sports movie I have seen but it is a very good one- at least worth one watch. Seldom do you get out of a sports movie feeling for both the winner and the loser- the characterization of both Vardon and Ouimet is impeccable and the acting outstanding. Watch it- you will not regret it.