BEFORE: It's the start of Steve Carell Weekend, but I've also got a little running theme going with biopics, fictionalized versions of real-life events. (They're like documentaries, only with actors!). A couple days ago it was a movie about the founding of the National Lampoon magazine, which I saw in documentary form first, and tonight it's a ground-breaking tennis match, where a man played a woman to determine which gender could play better. Really, they had "mixed doubles" in tennis for a long time, which is one man and one woman on each side of the court, so really, this was just the first professional "mixed singles" match, right? Why was it such a big deal, then? But of course this was also the subject of a documentary first, since it was such a turning point in sports and gender equality. Umm, right?
Before I get to some Oscar contenders for 2018, let me finally cross off this one from 2017. Fred Armisen carries over from "Game Over, Man!". I don't recall seeing him in that film, I must have blinked, but according to two sources, he was in there somewhere.
THE PLOT: The true story of the 1973 tennis match between number one women's tennis player Billie Jean King and ex-champ and serial hustler Bobby Riggs.
AFTER: Ah, we're going to have some difficult conversations tonight - this is one of those films that can't help but spark debate, over everything from gender equality to LGBTQ rights to discussing which male celebrity from the 1970's was the biggest chauvinist. Bobby Riggs is an obvious choice, of course, someone who not only delighting in saying shocking statements about how superior men are, but seemed to REVEL in it. And it was a different time, because today if a man says anything even approaching "Men are better because..." they'll find themselves ostracized and banned from Twitter.
I've found, as a rule that generalizations are always to be avoided. "All men are stronger than all women" can easily be disproven by comparing the strongest woman to the weakest man. "All white people are this..." and "all black people are that..." should set off red flags right away, as should "All lesbians don't shave their legs" or "All gay men talk like this." Really, the PC police should have beaten all of this stuff out of our minds by now, due to repetition alone. All generalizations are bad, umm, except this one itself.
Still, we have to remember that it wasn't that long ago where such generalizations were commonplace, and if enough people said, "Black people can't swim" or "White people can't run as fast as black people" or "Women aren't as strong as men" then it sort of became a generally accepted factoid. And most people tended to not speak out against it, or try to disprove it - so as a result, women got less prize money for winning sporting events, like TEN TIMES less, and protesting only resulted in dismissal, or getting oneself banned from winning any prize at all. Women tennis players took a stand in the 1970's, which was a step toward gender equality in pay, but while there are some sports that seemed to have gotten the memo, the main sporting leagues today are still far from integrated. We've got a WNBA now, which is great, and tennis and golf and the Olympics seem to be fair where gender is concerned, but what about baseball? (You mean the film "A League of Their Own" didn't fix everything?). I remember there was a women's baseball TEAM a few years back, the Silver Bullets, that would travel around and play exhibition games against men, but where's the WMLB? Where's the WNHL? (I don't expect there to be a WNFL, because I think women are smart enough to not want to play football and get concussed.)
Running concurrently with the gender equality story here is Billie Jean King's personal story of coming out, having a relationship with a woman while still married to a man. And of course I have no right to say "Oh, that's not how it went down..." because I wasn't there, but I might still have issues with how they tied her personal journey to her sports performance, because at the end of the day I think those are two separate issues, linked together only by her own self-confidence. I've lived in that space myself, since my first wife came out while we were still married, so perhaps I'm not the best judge of a similar story, I'm too close to the issue and I can't necessarily separate the movie story from my own experience. Because of course I'm going to empathize with Billie Jean's husband here, Larry King (not that one, another Larry King). At the same time that people tend to champion people who come out of the closet, very little emphasis tends to be put on the hardship of the spouses who get left behind. Who speaks for their rights and their feelings, while we celebrate another person's sexual awakening?
My take on the topic seen here is that Larry figures out his wife's sexual orientation just a bit too quickly, and processes it even faster - now, this could be because the movie needed to condense a long period of development and realization into just a few short incidents, given a limited time. Or it could be because it took me so long to figure out my wife's deal, and even longer for me to properly deal with it, so I could be projecting. (Either way, I know the stress dreams that resulted from my first marriage are now due to return...). Seriously, Larry finds ONE bra he doesn't recognize in Billie Jean's room, and suddenly he knows exactly what's been going on? This (and bumping into Marilyn in the hotel elevator) is very easily explained, because the new women's tennis association was just starting out, funds were tight, and the women probably needed to double up and share hotel rooms, anyway. Why didn't she try, "Hey, Larry, what a surprise, this is my roommate, Marilyn..."? A perfectly reasonable explanation, even on the fly.
But again, I wasn't there, so it's not for me to say. My point is that we'll never have sexual equality while one type of relationship is portrayed as "better" because it's trendier, freer, newer and the other type is portrayed as staler, more rigid and somehow inferior, just because it's been acceptable for a longer period of time. And if it was wrong of Larry to tell Marilyn that Billie Jean's fling with her was "just a phase", then it's just as wrong to treat hetero relationships as if they're somehow out of step with the times. In a truly equal world, neither one would be considered better or more right than the other. By showing King's performance on the court suffering when her husband was around, and then getting better after her girlfriend shows up, this film definitely displayed a bias for one over the other.
Bear in mind, a few years after the match with Bobby Riggs, Billie Jean was sued by her girlfriend Marilyn Bennett in a palimony suit. So eventually there was trouble in paradise, and not every single gay relationship works out for the best. Clearly Billie Jean's coming out was not the perfect solution to everything, so there's no reason why it should be portrayed as such. A few years back, when gay marriage became the law of the land in the U.S., people were celebrating far and wide, but with gay marriage comes gay divorce - you have to learn to take the bad with the good, and there are no easy answers, and winning a battle is not the same as winning the war.
But I think the film did a very good job of re-creating the 1970's, right down to the horrible fashions and the terrible TV graphics. Interesting special effects involve getting a modern day actress to appear to be standing next to Howard Cosell in archive footage, and the whole time, his hand is creepily on her right shoulder, and he's literally talking down to her and hovering over her. Ugh, is it possible to be grossed out by 40-year old footage of a sports reporter?
I didn't know that this was the second "mixed singles" match that Bobby Riggs played, so I learned today about the first match against Margaret Court, which he won, and the fact that this raised the financial stakes for the match against Billie Jean King. I didn't know Riggs was such a degenerate gambler, either, but that tracks. But there again is the suggestion that Riggs couldn't possibly become a good husband in some way until a woman humbled him on the court, and I'm not sure how I feel about that.
NITPICK POINT: They really didn't give poor Eric Christian Olsen anything to do here. He played Bobby Riggs' coach, only we never saw him coaching, or doing anything but sitting down and just watching the match. That seems like a real missed opportunity.
Also starring Emma Stone (last seen in "Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping"), Steve Carell (last heard in "Despicable Me 3"), Andrea Riseborough (last seen in "Nocturnal Animals"), Sarah Silverman (last seen in "The Book of Henry"), Bill Pullman (last seen in "Independence Day: Resurgence"), Alan Cumming (last heard in "Strange Magic"), Elisabeth Shue (last seen in "Hamlet 2"), Austin Stowell (last seen in "12 Strong"), Natalie Morales (last seen in "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps"), Jessica McNamee, Lewis Pullman, Martha MacIsaac, Mickey Sumner, Bridey Elliott, Eric Christian Olsen (last seen in "Eagle Eye"), Wallace Langham (last seen in "War Dogs"), Matt Malloy (last seen in "The Stepford Wives"), James MacKay, Lauren Kline, Ashley Weinhold, Fidan Manashirova, Kaitlyn Christian, Nancy Lehehan, Michael Chieffo, Bob Stephenson (last seen in "A Futile and Stupid Gesture"), Nelson Franklin (ditto), with cameos from Mark Harelik (last seen in "Trumbo"), Dan Bakkedahl (ditto), Jamey Sheridan (last seen in "Sully"), Tom Kenny (last seen in "Comic Book: The Movie"), Chris Parnell (last seen in "The Ridiculous 6"), John C. McGinley (last seen in "Sweet Liberty"), and archive footage of Lloyd Bridges (last seen in "The Talk of the Town"), Howard Cosell, Chris Evert, Pancho Gonzalez, Ricardo Montalban (last seen in "The Train Robbers"), and Rosey Grier.
RATING: 6 out of 10 packs of Virginia Slims
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