Sport/Life/Etc

Sport is, with some admittedly colossal differences, life. Rules exist, and are invariably broken, despair often outweighs triumph, and you generally need to be a Sky subscriber to enjoy either. It's because of this alignment that sport is perpetually such a fertile subject matter for film. The drama, the heroes, the villains, the glory, elements equally suited to describing 'The Dark Knight Rises' or the latest Champions League Final.

He's not exactly Nadal.

        Unfortunately, a lot of films purporting to be about sport (and for the purpose of this blog I'm not counting the likes of Happy Gilmore, Dodgeball, or anything with Will Ferrell clowning as a film rooted in sport) are...............well, shit. Anyone who has sat through Paul Bettany and Kirsten Dunst in 'Wimbledon' will know the film has about as much to do with sport as Sepp Blatter's advice to female footballers to 'wear shorter skirts'.



Perhaps the lack of truly great sports films has to do with the compromise needed. To elicit real drama, inevitably dramatic license with the sport in question is taken. Simultaneously, the show a sport as it truly is will frequently mean losing something cinematic in the process.
       But sometimes, just sometimes, like your favourite club who lose eight on the bounce then win 3-0 away at the league leaders to 'keep you believing', cinema gets it right. Spectacularly right. One of the most recent example of this is Clint Eastwood's 'Million Dollar Baby'.
       A-Listers such as Will Smith and Denzel Washington both tried their hands at boxing flicks, but neither got close to delivering the kind of punch/knockout blow/other cliche that 'MDB' does. And when the easiest, most dramatically viable option in a sports film is usually to have the protagonist finally overcoming struggle and achieving victory before the credits roll, 'MDB' destroys it's own premise, confounds expectations, and emerges as something pretty special.

      In the same vein, the criminally underwatched 'Friday Night Lights' takes a small Texan high school football team and creates the best American Football film ever made. It was so good that NBC picked up the story and converted it to a series still smashing viewing figures on US TV. As much about a town's obsession with their team and the responsibility placed on young men as it is about football, it captures machismo and heartbreak in a way Adam Sandler could only dream of.

Even the poster is offensive.

    With the subject matter being a US sport, maybe UK audiences don't quite connect with the likes of 'Friday Night Lights' and 'Moneyball' as much as their American counterparts, but, as with all great sports films, the drama and spectacle are far more important than the sport in question.
But for every 'Any Given Sunday' there has to be a 'Mr Baseball'. If you haven't seen this, please don't. It's basically Tom Selleck as a superstar ball player who goes off to Japan and spends 90 minutes being horrifically racist to Japanese people whilst twiddling his 'tache and then finally deciding 'oh actually Japanese people are ok' and then tries to bang one.
           In the UK we've been pretty starved of decent sports films over the years. 'Fever Pitch' and 'Match Point' may pass the time, but then again, so does sleeping. 'When Saturday Comes' had Sean Bean in it. That's literally all I remember about the film so I'm doubting it was brilliant. 'Bend It Like Beckham' passed the time, but then so did 'Fever Pitch'. 'The Damned United' did show that we have the capacity to produce a powerful, authentic sports biopic, but was very much an exception as opposed to a rule
   So, for great cinematic sporting fare, we have to look to the States. Boxing and fight sports feature heavily, and whilst the first 'Rocky' was actually pretty damn good, the likes of 'The Fighter', 'The Wrestler' and particularly 'Warrior' blow it out of the water.
Gritty to the point of watching with gravel in your eyes, the template for this type of film is now set for years to come. But it's 'Raging Bull' that still sets the bar for the genre, and maybe sports films on the whole. Brutal violence (in and out of the ring), one of the world's best actors delivering one of cinema's most memorable performances, and a mesmeric tale of riches to rags, it hasn't been bettered since.
    But not many films got as close as 2010's 'Senna'. It has everything. Drama, obsession, danger, rivalry, heartbreak, and, ultimately, sickening tragedy. It's a real life story that defines sport better than any script. This was a film so good that I nearly came to blows with two different people to have the cheek to say they wouldn't watch it because they 'didn't like documentaries' and 'thought Formula 1 was crap'. I haven't spoken to them since. The best sports films don't rely on an inherent love for baseball, basketball, or American Football. They rely only on your capacity to relate, to feel something. And that's the thing about sports films. As with certain parts of life, you don't really need to understand it to enjoy it.