Tommy's Honour

Plot

In St Andrews, Scotland in 1866, 15-year-old Tommy Morris (Jack Lowden) is an avid golfer like his legendary and pioneering father, Tom Morris (Peter Mullan). "Old Tom" is greens-keeper for The Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews, as well as the town’s club- and ball-maker. He is the three-time winner of the first major golf tournament, The Open Championship, which he founded in 1860. He also established golf's standard of 18 holes per round. But young Tommy is beginning to chafe at his father's dictates, especially in the rapidly changing world they live in.

Tommy soon outshines his father, winning The Open three times in a row while still in his teens. The "dashing young man of golf", he draws flocks of spectators to the sport and becomes its first touring professional.

Father and son repeatedly clash over the unwritten rules of social class, and this culminates when Tommy marries his sweetheart Meg (Ophelia Lovibond), a woman of lower standing with a shameful secret in her past. As the story concludes, Old Tom makes a fatal misjudgement that strips Tommy of everything he holds dear. Following the results of that fateful choice, Old Tom takes on a personal mission that carries him through the final decades of his life: that of honouring his son Tommy.

Main cast

Production

In 2010 producer Jim Kreutzer happened to read Kevin Cook's Herbert Warren Wind Book Award–winning 2007 book Tommy's Honor: The Story of Old Tom Morris and Young Tom Morris, Golf's Founding Father and Son, and immediately obtained the film rights for it. The project remained in development for several years. The author Cook's wife Pamela Marin, an accomplished journalist and memoirist, adapted the book into a screenplay along with Cook.

In January 2014 Jason Connery, son of Sean Connery, was announced as the film's director. He stated:

I am so incredibly passionate and excited to tell this story. It is a story that is truly close to my heart as I grew up with my father on a golf course, and I have a home an hour from St. Andrews. This is an extraordinary and intimate tale of love and family at the beginning of the great game of golf. This story has to be told!

Connery also noted that his father, a serious golfer in addition to being a renowned actor, gave him ideas and insight about making the film.

Kreutzer, along with venture capitalist Keith Bank, established Gutta Percha Productions for the sole purpose of financing and producing Tommy's Honour. The film's additional producers are Bob Last, Tim Moore, and Kenneth C. Whitney. In June 2015 the production received a £400,000 grant from National Lottery Funding through Creative Scotland's Screen Production Fund.

The two lead actors, Peter Mullan and Jack Lowden, were cast in July 2015. Neither had prior experience with golf, although Lowden had done several leading roles as an athlete or soldier, in Black Watch, Chariots of Fire, and The Passing Bells.

Filming began in mid August 2015, and was completed in late September 2015. All filming took place on location in Scotland, in over 50 locations including in St Andrews and surrounding areas, Edinburgh and Musselburgh, and towns such as Peebles and Falkland. The shoot lasted six weeks, but there was rain on only one day, which is unusual for Scotland.

Release

Tommy's Honour was selected to open the 2016 Edinburgh International Film Festival on 15 June 2016, which was the film's premiere. At the festival it was also nominated for the Michael Powell Award for Best British Feature Film. It continued screening at the festival through 26 June. The film also screened at London Screenings at BFI Southbank, an international film-marketing conference for British films which lasted from 20–23 June 2016. Sean Connery, who was unable to attend the EIFF debut of his son's film, screened Tommy's Honour in a cinema near his home in the Bahamas in July 2016.

The film showed at the Dinard British Film Festival in Dinard, France from 28 September to 2 October 2016. It screened at the Haifa International Film Festival in mid-October 2016, and at the BBC First British Film Festival 2016 in Australia, which began in late October 2016.

Roadside Attractions acquired the U.S. rights to Tommy's Honour in September 2016. It will open nationwide in the U.S. on 14 April 2017, and later receive cable television airing on the Golf Channel. It will also be released internationally in the spring of 2017, and international sales of the film are handled by Timeless Films.

Reception

Initial reviews immediately following the film's debut at the Edinburgh International Film Festival agreed that it is a good and pleasant film. The performances of the two leads, Mullan and Lowden, were widely praised. Some reviewers felt that the film may have tried to do too much due to having several themes, and a few felt that some of the golfing sequences were repetitive.

Screen Daily, while acknowledging the film's central father-son drama, also noted the portrayal of the class conflicts of 19th-century golf – played by the lower classes, attended by unruly crowds, and owned and bet on by aristocrats who controlled and profited from the sport. The review also opined that "As the principals play across the film's varied locations, in all weather, viewers get a true sense of golf's real grit, a more essential and raw essence of the sport than is achieved in most coverage today."

Kate Muir in The Times concluded that the film is "fairly conventional, and your pleasure in it will probably be predicated on your love for the game." Conversely, Ross Miller in The National called the film "emotional, inspiring and deeply heartfelt" and wrote "You don’t have to be a golf fan to be taken in by this engrossing, quietly passionate film that not only brings something new to the sports biopic table but also serves as a poignant, often heartbreaking portrait of paternal love and pursuing your passion with everything you have." In January 2017, Justin Lowe in The Hollywood Reporter said the film "offers an engrossing and accessible celebration of the game’s modern origins, enhanced by striking locations and a standout cast."

In October 2016 Tommy's Honour was nominated for the BAFTA Scotland Award for Best Feature Film, and Jack Lowden was nominated for Best Film Actor for his performance as Tommy Morris. In November the film won Best Feature Film at the 2016 British Academy Scotland Awards.