The Greatest Game Ever Played (2005) and the Aesthetics of Grass

The Greatest Game Ever Played (2005) reflects the precise attention to detail expected from Disney. With intricate care, the film recreates a turn-of-the twentieth century context, bringing to life a Massachusetts working class world that features Francis Ouimet’s unlikely 1913 win at the U.S. Open. The film foregrounds Shia LaBeouf as Francis Ouimet first as a boy living across from a golf course in Brookline, Massachusetts where he works as a caddy, and then as a young man working in a retail shop in 1913 but eventually choosing to play for a spot in the U.S. Open. Like earlier golf films, The Legend of Bagger Vance (2005) and Bobby Jones: Stroke of Genius (2004) The Greatest Game Ever Played (2005) precisely reconstructs almost every aspect of the period in which the film is set. The Greatest Game Ever Played (2005) shows us the costumes, cars, houses, and even golf clubs of the period from the 1890s to 1913, but it fails to maintain historical accuracy on two counts: lawns and golf course greens. The Greatest Game Ever Played maintains historical accuracy except when it comes to the grass aesthetic. Such a view of grass is so deeply engrained that we now consider a perfect lawn and golf green natural. 

Director Bill Paxton sees The Greatest Game Ever Played (2005) as a film unlike other golf films, especially The Legend of Bagger Vance and Bobby Jones, Stroke of Genius. Shia LaBeouf, the film’s star (who played Francis Ouimet) claims Paxton told him to “Go watch The Legend of Bagger Vance because that’s exactly what we’re not going to make” (quoted in Murray). According to LaBeouf, “That’s slow and drawn out. That’s somebody filming golf. It’s not somebody in the mind of a golfer filming that” (quoted in Murray). Paxton argues that he was “not doing [our movie] that way. We’re not shooting this as a golf movie. It’s a cowboy [movie], a shootout. It’s not a ball; it’s your life. That’s not a club; it’s your weapon” (quoted in Murray). 

The Greatest Game Ever Played (2005) seeks to set itself apart from earlier films by replicating golfing sequences through hard work and training. Unlike the earlier films in which stars Matt Damon and Jim Caviezel trained only for two or three weeks, Shia LaBeouf (with Paxton’s inspiration) wanted to “really golf,” so he trained for six months, working with the UCLA golf team and golfing with avid golfers of various ages. In The Greatest Game Ever Played, historical accuracy includes the game itself—all except the lawns and golf greens throughout the film. In fact, Roger Ebert even admits, “I have no idea if the movie is based, stroke for stroke, on the actual competition at the 1913 U.S. Open. I guess I could find out, but I don’t want to know. I like it that way.”   

Bill Paxton and Mark Frost worked together on the sets of The Greatest Game Ever Played so that it “didn’t have that nostalgic, sepia-toned glow of so many period movies—the kind that make it look as though the film was shot through a jar of honey. We wanted to take a different, grittier approach, they explain. To get this effect, they drew from a “book of old depression-era WPA photographs called Bound for Glory” that Bill Paxton perused. According to Paxton, “the photos were taken on early color Kodachrome film and they had a very stark, very realistic, feel to them. And this was the same look we decided we wanted for the film.”

Paxton applied this strategy to the golfing scenes, as well, setting the film apart from other golf movies. He not only ensured that the golfers in the film could play the game, but that the camera angles highlighted their competition rather than getting “caught up” in what Paxton calls “the pastoral nature of the sport.” In the production notes, Paxton describes in detail how he and the director of cinematography, Shane Hurlbut attempted “to capture the same kind of high-contrast resolution they’d admired in the [kodachrome] photographs” and how they used the camera work to recreate the various golfer’s differing psychological game. The goal for scenes on the golf course was to translate a Western-style gunfight into a golf shootout. According to Paxton, “the timing and the sense of framing really echo that style. And then we go in with a tight Sergio Leone-type close-up to enhance the feeling.” 

What they don’t do, however, is attempt to provide an historically accurate view of the course grasses.  Before World War II, turf technology could not provide the grasses on display in The Greatest Game Ever Played. Tom Fazio provides an overview of golf course design history in his Golf Course Designsthat makes it clear that golf course architects have “learned to make experience, education, and technology work for us in ways [Alister] Mackenzie [golf architect from the 1920s and1930s] and his generation could scarcely have imagined” (64). During this classic period, Fazio asserts that “nature made [classic architects’] decision for them” (77). For example, during this period “storm drainage was not a part of course design. Everything surface drained. Floods came and were tolerated. People waited for the water to run off” (Fazio 77). The rain sequence in The Greatest Game Ever Played (2004), on the other hand, suggests that play can continue no matter how wet the courses become.

Not only does the film fail to recreate the grasses available before 1946 (and the technology for maintaining it). It also fails to accurately depict courses of the period, a period in which nature was emphasized above artificial surfaces that aided play. Settings for The Greatest Game Ever Played can serve as an effective example of how what was depicted in the film fails to line up with what golf courses of the period looked like. Although the film is shot in Quebec, Canada (primarily to save money), it recreates the streets of Brookline, Massachusetts and passes off golf courses in the Montreal area as The Country Club at Brookline. The golf course at Brookline hosted Francis Ouimet’s U.S. Open win in 1913, but its architectural history looks like a hodge podge rather than a plan. According to Thomas MacWood, the course evolved over a period from 1893, when the first six holes were laid out, until 1913, when Francis Ouimet won the U.S. Open. 

Both technology and aesthetics, then, contributed to golf course appearance before World War II, an appearance historical golf films such as The Greatest Game Ever Played fail to replicate, all because grass lawns and golf courses have become so naturalized that they are seen as an essential given rather than a literal and social construction.