It's the DVD cover!

A Gentleman's Game (2001)

I'm sure you had that figured out by now anyway.

Outline: One summer, Timmy Price (Mason Gamble) decides to take up golf, and his dad (Dylan Baker) decides that he would learn a lot more about the game and Fox Chase (their golf/country club) by caddying. Timmy demonstrates an excellent swing, so a respected club member (Philip Baker Hall) recommends Timmy take lessons from Foster Pearse (Gary Sinise), an one-time amateur champion turned horticulturalist.

If you think that there's something very strange and circular going on with all the F's and P's in the names of people and places, you're not wrong.

This, my friends, is a quiet movie. A quiet movie can only be viewed in a certain state of mind, and it is often an acquired taste. A quiet movie has a few points, makes them, and moves on without bothering itself about what kind of impact it will make. I have half a mind to compare this movie to the game of golf itself, but I really have no idea, having never played myself. A putt-putt movie, on the other hand, I'd be all over that.

I'd like to say good things about this movie or to say bad, but it's all relative in this case. The plot's your garden variety adults-learn-from-the-lessons-of-children with a little this-is-too-heavy-for-kids coming of age business mixed in for good measure, but it's nothing you've never seen before. Co-writers J. Mills Goodloe (who also directed) and Tom Coyne (who wrote the novel) seem to disregard the obviousness of their storyline to concentrate on the individual scenes instead. Naturally I liked that idea.

They also assembled a handy team. Sinise is the ultimate in the "actors who just act the hell out of everything they are in" category. Heck, he's the reason it exists. I've never seen him in anything where I felt he was out of his element.

Gamble's probably got a nice future ahead of him in movie's. I've only seen him in Gattaca and Rushmore, and you know how I feel about those movies. What can I say? Gamble seems to already be taking a page from Sinise's book, and that's not a bad way to go.

The movie probably could have done better if it hadn't been held back by an R rating, but I can see why they gave it one. It also adds to the bittersweet quality of the picture - Timmy must learn who he can look up to and for what reasons, and that's never fun as a kid.

Of course, if you really want to learn about a boy growing into adolescence when he already thinks he's got it figured out, you're better off reading Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. C+