[Each of the last
six years, I’ve used the Super
Bowl week to AmericanStudy
some sports
histories and stories. This year I’ve decided to focus on sports movies and
what they can tell us about American culture and identity. Be a good sport and share
your responses and nominees in comments for a crowd-sourced weekend post that’s
sure to take home the championship!]
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 films were the Oscar-nominated American
Hustle (2013) and Joy (2015), 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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