BATTLE
OF THE SEXES
2017, PG-13, 121 mins. Emma Stone as Billie Jean King / Steve Carell as Bobby Riggs / Andrea Riseborough as Marilyn Barnett / Sarah Silverman as Gladys Heldman / Alan Cumming as Ted Tinling Directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris / Written by Simon Beaufoy |
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The match had other significant ramifications beyond the sport of tennis, in particular for King, who very publicly stated "I thought it would set us back 50 years if I didn't win the match. It would ruin the women's tour and affect all women's self esteem." This was more than just a tennis match against a male opponent for her; this was a chance to propel gender equality in sports - and all facets of life - to the next level. BATTLE OF THE
SEXES is a rock solid recreation of the gargantuan media circus that
permeated this event, but directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris (LITTLE
MISS SUNSHINE and the criminally underrated RUBY
SPARKS) and screenwriter Simon Beaufoy (the Oscar winning writer
of SLUMGDOG
MILLIONAIRE) use the titular sports battle to speak volumes about
the relevancy of gender rights...even in the modern era.
Their film wisely and rightfully embodies a message that King v.
Riggs was a social/cultural turning point that transcended tennis and
instead pointed out the more significant battle between women battling for
equality and men battling equally as hard to maintain their gender's
perceived superiority status quo.
Of course and
predictably, BATTLE OF THE SEXES is at its most enthrallingly entertaining
when focuses on the whole build-up to the 1973 match, showcasing both
players fighting for things well beyond personal dignity.
Many critics have rightfully pointed out that the Battle of the
Sexes was a money grabbing publicity stunt, with the ringmaster-like Riggs
serving as the ultimate huckster selling the event and making it must-see
television. The carnival-like
atmosphere of the match is undeniable, not to mention that it could be
very easily said that Riggs was hardly a well oiled athlete at his
physical peak when he played against an opponent that was young enough to
be his daughter. Dayton,
Faris, and Beaufoy - if they're collectively guilty of anything - tend to
turn a blind eye to the sensationalistic and questionable legitimacy of
the match, which holds back BATTLE OF THE SEXES from achieving a
democratic handling of the material (not to mention their handling of a rather one-sided
portrait of Riggs, more on that in a bit).
Still, their film is a searing examination of the skewed gender
norms of the period, not to mention an absolutely captivating portrait of
an endlessly fascinating sports figure and rights activist in King. In the opening
stages of the 1970s Billie Jean King (Emma Stone) was an emerging tennis
champion that was poised on taking over the sporting world on both a
professional and personal level. Early
on, though, she's flabbergasted at the frustrating levels of pay inequity
that exists between woman and male players.
Realizing that promoters would be up shit creek without a
proverbial paddle without her and her tennis playing sisters, King decides
- with the support of her manager (a snarky Sarah Silverman) - to
start their own woman's-only league in the Woman's Tennis Association,
which gets off to reasonable levels of success early on.
While on the road King hooks up with a kind hearted hairdresser,
Marilyn (Andrea Riseborough), who nonchalantly, but pointedly begins a
subtle campaign to get the repressed lesbian in King to come out of the
closet, which would be a no-no considering that she's married to her
deeply devoted husband Larry (Austin Stowell) and revealing her homosexuality to
the unsympathetic world of the era would be a professional
death sentence. Nevertheless,
King comes to grips with her sexual orientation while on tour, all
while retired pro tennis player and compulsive gambler Bobbie Riggs (Steve
Carell), starts to stir the pot for a possible tennis match between
himself and King that he hopes will prove to the world where women
really belong. It's kind of
surprising how little of the running time for BATTLE OF THE SEXES focuses
on the actual tennis match-up itself.
It's really more of a deeply intimate portrait that cuts
surprisingly deep into the inner struggles of King herself, who was not
only waging a war within herself about her sexual identity and later
awakening, but also the larger cerebral war of wits with Riggs himself,
who positioned himself as the ultimate male chauvinist pig that was out to
prove that women have no place at all on the higher alter of sports hero
worship as the men. The film
is patient and takes an observational tone with the domestic life of King
and the quandary she found herself in between being an outspoken and very
public champion of the Women's Lib Movement and keeping her homosexual
affair a well guarded secret. The
scenes between Stone and Riseborough are among the film's most
captivating, seeing as they evoke King as someone that's deeply
motivated and charged up by her new same sex lover, but unfortunately
realizes that she can't do much about it for fear of destroying her
livelihood as an activist and athlete.
It's easy to
overlook what a monumentally important figure King was in her era; not
only was she one of the foremost tennis players (male or not) of her time,
but she was also a pro athlete that was aggressively using the sport to
help support her cause for gender equality on and off the court...and
she was one of the first major athletes to come out as gay.
Emma Stone may not look much like King at all, but she's
resoundingly strong and convincing for displaying her headstrong conviction,
never-say-die attitude, and her thoughtfully shy and vulnerable side
that makes her such an endlessly compelling character of exploration.
She's flanked extremely well by Riseborough, who arguably has the
toughest performance challenge in the film of evoking a woman that's in
love with an extremely famous one and feels constantly like a source of
unintentional stress on King's life.
There's so much aching melancholy and yearning in Riseborough's
performance, and her scenes with Stone are the emotional glue that keeps
BATTLE OF THE SEXES from devolving down the obligatory paths of lesser
sports films. Films that try to
recreate the 1970s have the trickiest challenge, in my humble opinion,
seeing as they have to accurately reflect the aesthetic garishness of the
period without drawing too much distracting attention to it.
Dayton and Faris lovingly imbue BATTLE OF THE SEXES with suitably grounded, textured, and lived-in production design elements that
contains a bright primary color palette that pops off the screen that's
further complimented with an eccentrically varied music soundtrack that cements
our level of easy immersion. And, yes, when the film does culminate with the climatic
tennis match it's handled with relative straightforward simplicity that
manages the Herculean task of generating suspense from an event that we
already know the outcome too. And
when King does emerge victorious we don't see her basking in the glory of
her victory, but rather in a quiet and soulful moment involving her
quietly crying in the locker room, suddenly realizing that the magnitude of her
accomplishment goes beyond beating her opponent. I've spoken a lot
about how BATTLE OF THE SEXES deals with King as a character, which is
telling because one of its major flaws is that Riggs is frankly not given
equal screen time treatment here, which is a bit of a squandered
opportunity. Instead of
thoroughly getting inside what made this man's head tick and discovering
what psychologically drove him, BATTLE OF THE SEXES reduces Riggs to a
somewhat one-note publicity seeking hound caricature.
He was, no doubt, an outward bigot in press tours and while in
the constant media spotlight that preceded the match, but was he really a
venomous anti-women's lib predator or just a playful jerk that laid on his
chauvinist schtick far too thickly for the purposes of selling the event? BATTLE OF THE SEXES doesn't really know, and even during
perfunctory scenes with him on the home front with his wife (thanklessly
played by Elizabeth Shue in a very marginalized role) that try to humanize
him, he never emerges as a fully well realized and rounded character.
It's a shame, because Carrel delivers a laser beam focused
performance that deserves a better written character than what's he given
(plus, he's an absolute physical dead ringer for Riggs and is
exceptionally well cast). Beyond that and
as already mentioned, I have to ask again: Was King's victory really a legitimate one
on purely athletic levels (after
all, she wasn't playing opposite of a similarly aged man)?
It wasn't exactly an equally skilled Battle of the Sexes.
However, maybe that's not the point.
BATTLE OF THE SEXES does downplay many of the 1973 match's more
questionable legacy and opts to craft a poignantly realized fact based
sports drama that's ultimately not really about sports at all.
It's more about the intrinsically mesmerizing personality at the
heart of the event that had the most to win and lose while having the audacity
to battle a male dominated world when very few of her contemporaries
wouldn't dare. BATTLE OF THE
SEXES works as a portal into the wickedly uneven gender politics of a bygone era
that, rather unfortunately, still reverberates to this day, which makes
the film all the more germane and topical to contemporary audiences.
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