There are lines in Battle of the Sexes that are heavy-handed and should land in your stomach wrong. They’re lines of unbridled optimism, that in almost any other movie would provide a fakeness that couldn’t be reconciled with. Yet here, contrasted against the clandestine use of sexism, those lines all but shine. They twinkle like wonderful little gold strips of humanity, bright and noticeable like the film’s 35mm cinematography. They shine through the inhumanity at the center of the film. The sickening, rotting corpse of modernity sitting on the sides of the bright wealth of the character’s residences. Of course, the story can’t cover all injustices, it is simply not built to, but the film viscerally goes for broke on the ones that it does attack. For all the unbridled confidence in the antagonist’s sexism, the film returns in its unbridled, even sentimental, humanism. For all the moral quandaries that consume our characters, there is an air of human decency, an understanding that humans can change and that sometimes things don’t make sense, sometimes things are just what they are. Battle of the Sexes is a rare beast of a biopic that had me so consumed I was ready to punch almost all of the male characters in the face. One where even though I knew the ending, it stood as something to look forward to, something to get excited for, something that kept all the frustrations getting there ruthlessly compelling. Battle of the Sexes, on its face value isn’t great, but emotionally it worked me like putty in its hands and it made me happier than almost any film this year. Battle of the Sexes follows the events leading up to the tennis match between Billie Jean King (here portrayed by Emma Stone) and Bobby Riggs (Steve Carell), that itself was dubbed “The Battle of the Sexes,” and if you pay attention to any of this, you know that King truly did king Riggs in the battle. Like the best biopics though, the builds itself on a skeleton of emotionality that exists outside of the actual stakes of the game. The whole film is about showing the complexities of the humans involved and the screenplay is surprisingly well put together, even if it is a bit structurally wonky. The film establishes the main thread of adversity towards sexism and then dives headfirst into situations where a level of acceptance, of human decency, are used from most of the characters. King starts an adulterous relationship, and discovers a new part of herself, something that her husband figures out early, but treats with the level of respect that it somewhat deserves. There’s something beautiful about discovering a new part of yourself, and while this critic being a straight cis white male (i.e. the type of critic this world does not need any more of) can’t really speak for the one demonstrated by the film, I do understand that the feeling of new love and passion is wonderful and is captured with an authenticity here that only the worn images of 35mm can truly capture. Stone and Andrea Riseborough harness a distilled charm in their chemistry, and playing against each other are almost irresistible. On Briggs's side, he’s dealing with a gambling addiction and a failing marriage, but what gets interesting about him is how he’s swallowed up by his own belief that the system of looking at genders of the time is more comfortable than accepting the reality that humans are what they are. Carell is a really underappreciated talent, mainly being characterized as a comedian, even following his work in Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher, but as Bobby Briggs, he reaches a level of nuance that can only be trumped by the former performance’s sheer chameleon effect. He’s not a total chauvinist pig as he might suggest, but he sees the allure of it and eventually steps wholeheartedly into the role. Battle of the Sexes does a lot to humanize the man but also shows the acidic wrongheadedness of what he’s so avid to accept. Much of the other ignorant characters are much that way, so comfortable in their ways that they don’t realize the real harm they are doing to their own and the others humanity. And it is with all of this that I think allows Battle of the Sexes to earn its stand up and cheer moments. There’s so much contrast to the moments of true humanity and the moments of ignorant pandering to the assumptions of society that you can’t help but take all the lines, all the wonderful, sentimental, heavy-handed, human lines and accept them as victories. You can’t help but be caught up in the movement of characters, of the beauty in their loves, and the tragedy of their faults. Writer Simon Beaufoy and directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris have not crafted a perfect film, but they have managed to get me more engaged and riled up than I have been in a movie theatre in a while. Congrats, I was enraptured. I give Battle of the Sexes a 9 out of 10.
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December 2017
CategoriesAuthorHello welcome to FilmAnalyst. My name is Stephen Tronicek, and I really like movies. This is a way to get my opinions out to people. Thank you for visiting. |