[Each of the last
few years, I’ve used the Super
Bowl week to AmericanStudy some sports
histories and stories. This year I wanted to do the same, focusing this
time on sports movies and what they can tell us about American culture and
identity. Be a good sport and share your thoughts in comments, please!]
On the
interesting results when an unconventional filmmaker works in a conventional genre.
Like any
well-established and longstanding genre (from romantic comedies to slasher
films to Westerns to action
movies), sports movies tend to operate according to certain conventions. As
my posts this week have demonstrated, there are certainly different options
within those conventions, such as the lovable loser story or the heroic
underdog tale. But even across those sub-genres, many of the genre’s conventional
beats and stages still apply: the
training montage, the moment when all seems hopeless and lost for our
protagonists, the dramatic shift that signals the start of something more positive,
and so on. Whether we’re talking about the Daniel-san in The Karate Kid (1984), the Jamaican
bobsled team in Cool Runnings (1993),
or Keanu and his fellow
scabs in The Replacements (2000; another team coached by Gene
Hackman, in case the genre echoes weren’t strong enough), the story is still
the story, by and large.
So what happens
when a filmmaker whose career has been one long refusal to adhere to convention
turns his attention to sports movies? We’ve seen two recent examples of that combination
in the career of David O. Russell,
the highly unconventional filmmaker behind movies as diverse but uniformly
unusual as Spanking the Monkey (1994),
Three Kings (1999), and I Heart Huckabees (2004). Russell’s most
recent film was the Oscar-nominated blockbuster American Hustle (2013), but before that he made two successive
films that I would classify as highly unconventional sports movies: The Fighter (2010),
the story of real-life Lowell, Mass. boxer Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg) and his
drug-addicted half-brother Dickie (the phenomenal Christian Bale);
and Silver Linings Playbook (2012),
a screwball romantic comedy about two troubled Philadelphians (played to
perfection by Bradley
Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence) that turns into a sports movie as they train
for a climactic dance competition while Cooper’s father (Robert De Niro) makes a
life-or-death bet on an upcoming Eagles game.
In some ways,
both films adhere closely to the kinds of conventions I highlighted above: Silver Linings has both an extended
training montage for the dance competition and a lovable losers ending (they
score a highly mediocre score, but it’s what they needed for the bet so
mediocrity is victory in this case); The
Fighter ends with its heroic underdog overcoming his obstacles, winning
against all odds, and winning the girl in the process. But it’s in their
extended, nuanced, dark yet thoughtful portrayals of mental and physical
illness that both films go outside the bounds of typical sports movies. By far
the best sequences in The Fighter involve
Bale’s Dickie, who neither a hero nor a lovable loser, but an addict and
criminal struggling to survive from day to day. And despite its more conventional
(and foreshadowed from the title on) happy ending, Silver Linings takes all three of its protagonists and its audience
with them to uncomfortable places, asking us to see these characters not as
underdogs or losers or any other types, but as three-dimensional humans
struggling with the kinds of challenges against which there is perhaps no
victory, simply endurance. That might not be a sports movie lesson, but it’s a
pretty important one.
Last
MovieStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other sports movies you’d highlight?
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