“Seven Days in Utopia” may someday rank as one of the worst inspirational sports dramas ever made. That it even qualifies as a sports drama is nothing short of miraculous, considering the pastime at hand is golf. Have you heard all the jokes George Carlin made about golf, specifically the one about how it relates to flies? The end of this movie proves he was right; it’s a sport so monumentally boring that it intrinsically fails to generate any real level of excitement. Unlike the typical sports film – in which the plot revolves around basketball, football, baseball, boxing, martial arts, or anything that elicits a genuine emotional reaction – this movie ends with two men casually swinging golf clubs before walking after the balls and hitting them again. I cannot imagine any potential audience cheering and applauding for this. Those that do consist of people that desperately need to expand their horizons.

Adapted from David L. Cook’s novel “Golf’s Sacred Journey: Seven Days at the Links of Utopia,” the film attempts to turn golf into a spiritual parable. This in and of itself is not automatically a bad idea. The issue is the way in which the filmmakers go about it. The story is sappy, uncomplicated, and filtered through a lens so polished that we’re blinded by the glare. Every character is a desperately broad stereotype so sanitized that they don’t even use swear words. Indeed, the film has been slapped with a G rating, and I’m sure the MPAA had a tough time coming to that decision. It’s pumped so full of treacle that it practically oozes from the screen. When its ultimate message is finally delivered, we come to the annoying realization that it belongs less in the movies and more within the folds of a Hallmark greeting card.

It tells the story of Luke Chisholm (Lucas Black), a young golfer from Texas. As the film begins, he has just made a disastrous debut on the pro circuit – he blew his final hole at the Texas Open – and is driving home in a rage. He soon happens upon the town of Utopia, population 235, where he narrowly avoids a cow on the road and crashes through a fence. He’s then introduced to a rancher named Johnny Crawford (Robert Duvall), and although the fence was on his property, he sees to it that Luke gets medical attention and his car gets serviced. And so we meet the locals, a reliable grab bag of down-home country folk who all know each other and regularly convene at the diner. The only major difference is that, this time around, every character is so spotlessly clean that they should each have their likeness printed on a box of Cascade. This would include the hotheaded boyfriend, who, despite his obvious disapproval of Luke, will eventually make the most sudden and miraculous of turnarounds.

Anyway, it turns out that Johnny was himself a pro golfer at one time, and because he possesses years of wisdom, he takes it upon himself to train Luke over the course of seven days. If you can imagine a cross between a golf instruction manual and the Tao Te Ching, Johnny’s philosophy and methodology should be easier for you to understand. He could be compared to Mr. Miyagi, were it not for the fact that his training exercises truly have nothing to do with golf. At one point, for example, he drops a golf ball on the ground in front of a tree; he then instructs Luke to recreate the landscape with paint and a canvas, and he must depict the direction the ball must travel in order to clear the tree and end up in the field across the road. Only after painting the scene will he actually try to hit the ball. Incidentally, Luke is a wonderful artist.

As Luke continues his training, he falls in love with a young woman named Sarah (Deborah Ann Woll), an aspiring horse whisperer. Their relationship is so innocent that they seem more like twelve-year-olds on a first date than like proper adults. Consider the fact that when they part ways at the end, they share not a kiss but a polite hug, the kind you’d see between a kid sister and a big brother. In spite of the nauseating wholesomeness with which they were developed, both Sarah and Luke have emotional baggage. Sarah lost her father only a few years earlier, which means her mother (Melissa Leo) will spend all of her scenes gazing longingly through the blur of her tears. Luke was browbeaten into golf by his unreasonable hardass of a father (Joseph Lyle Taylor), while Johnny’s marriage broke down because of alcoholism. The empty liquor bottle on his mantle reminds him of that every day.

After wading through several astoundingly soppy emotional climaxes, we reach the finale and the obligatory Big Game. I won’t provide you with a play-by-play. I will say that the innate dullness of golf is reflected in the way Luke and his rival, Asian pro T.K. Oh (real life golfer KJ Choi), graciously nod at each other every time they exchange glances. The real kicker is not the outcome of the game, but the start of the end credits, at which point a web address flashes onscreen and we’re encouraged to log on via reverse psychology. Yes, it worked on me. I wish it hadn’t, though. To have “Seven Days in Utopia” end the way it did, and then to entice audiences to visit a website with promises of more information, suggests a pathetic need to manipulate audiences into submission. It doesn’t matter how compelling your message is – the more you try to force me to hear it, the more I refuse to listen.

- Chris Pandolfi

More Recent Reviews:

Battleship (2012)

Girl in Progress (2012)

God Bless America (2012)

Dragon Eyes (2012)

Cup, The (2012)

 

  Recommendations: