Battle of the Sexes review: Game, set and match

Trend News To Day in Google -  When the urge to see his eyes glaze over overwhelms me, I bore my 20-year-old son with a lecture about mainstream attitudes towards women and gay people in the 1970s that beggar his generation’s belief. The next time that urge strikes I will tie him to the sofa and make him watch Battle of the Sexes for a more entertaining tutorial than this dullard could possibly provide.

Its subject is one of the most curious, farcical and significant events in sporting history. In September 1973 a loudly, proudly sexist middle-aged braggart took on the world’s best female tennis player in Houston, Texas. On the line, along with the colossal winner-takes-all purse of $100,000, was the assumed superiority of the male sex.

Bobby Riggs (Steve Carell), who had won the US Open three decades earlier, was a gambling-addicted, emasculated husband of a rich wife. Billie Jean King (Emma Stone), who had won the US Open the previous year, led the women in more than the rankings. 

Racketeering: Battle of the Sexes starring Emma Stone and Steve Carell ©Fox Searchlight Pictures Supplied by LMK

As the film relates, she orchestrated their defection from the US Lawn Tennis Association in protest at the disparity in pay (whatever happened to that old thing?). Her manager Gladys Heldman (a waspishly restrained Sarah Silverman) informs her that men’s prize money for a forthcoming tournament is eight times that for the women, who we see washing their knickers in cheap motel sinks. But setting up the rival Women’s Tennis Association is just the start for BJK.

Needing the cash almost as much as the attention, Riggs goads King with trash talk about women belonging in the kitchen and bedroom. At first she resists. But after he thrashes her Aussie rival Margaret Court (Jessica McNamee) King accepts the challenge to defend the reputation of women’s tennis.

If John McEnroe is right that Serena Williams would not be ranked among the top 700 men, that is due solely to physical power. A punter as shrewd as Riggs would bet the house on a fit Serena, even at 36, thrashing the 56-year-old McEnroe,

So, on paper, the match between 55-year-old Riggs and 29-year-old King looks like panto with wooden rackets. In a sense, it was. The combatants are carried to the court on sedan chairs and King presents Riggs with a live porker in ironic tribute to his male chauvinist piggery. 

But it was bigger than a tennis version of WWE, and captured the imagination like no TV event since the Moon landing (90 million watched worldwide). Worth a million burned bras so far, as altered perceptions go, a comical moment in sporting terms was a deadly serious one in the war against dementedly archaic gender stereotyping.

Good sports movies accept the impossibility of making the action truly realistic and use it as a device to frame more intriguing matters. Raging Bull, in which the boxing never convinces, is about a brittle, confused man struggling to come to terms with his masculinity. Battle of the Sexes, in which the tennis is equally unconvincing (you will see harder ground strokes struck by geriatrics on public courts) is about the tortured private lives of the contestants and the stultifyingly retrograde bores of the age.

Among the many elements to admire, not least the attention to period detail, the casting stands out. Although hardly a ringer for BJK (they would have needed Velma from Scooby Doo for that) Stone gives her best performance since she first exploded as a fully formed generational talent in 2010’s Easy A. 

She doesn’t play the magnificent King as a hero or icon of the fight for equality but as a brave and clever but vulnerable young woman, gingerly emerging from a staid marriage to the sweetly attentive Larry (Austin Stowell) towards the acceptance that she is gay. Andrea Riseborough is superb as Marilyn Barnett, the free-spirited hairdresser who teases her out of the closet as she teases her hair into shape. 

You expect Steve Carell, who is the spit of Riggs in wig and sideburns, to milk such an outlandish character for laughs. He does, berating a Gamblers Anonymous meeting that their problem isn’t the addiction. “Your problem,” he yells, “is that you are terrible gamblers.” More impressive is Carell’s elevation of a wilfully offensive self-caricature into a likable, fragile and fully rounded character.

The film’s first half is a touch clunky as the back stories are told in juxtaposition. The contrast between Riggs’s public brazenness and his little-boy sheepishness at home with wife Priscilla (Elizabeth Shue) is less interesting than the gulf between King’s public self-assurance and her private struggle with her sexuality at a time when admitting she liked women would have ended her career.

But directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris (Little Miss Sunshine) never drop the pace, and writer Simon Beaufoy (Slumdog Millionaire) balances the gags and poignancy in a film that feels shorter than its two hours.

I won’t state the result for those too young to recall the event. Suffice it to record that it shook up the world and helped inspire Philadelphia Freedom, the paean to his friend Billie Jean by Elton John (whose Rocket Man features on a fine soundtrack).

Two years ago this charmingly artless movie might have seemed an unnerving slice of social history masquerading as sporting biography. After the 2016 US election the scrap between a funny, rude, bombastic showman and an earnest woman fiercely dedicated to equality has a painfully contemporary feel that bolsters its impact with the sense of history repeating itself in reverse order to Marx’s doctrine — the first time as farce, the second as tragedy.

Source: standard.co.uk