FOOTIE FILM FALLS DOWN Biopic does not do Pelé’s story justice, says Carlos Amato
This retelling does the power of Pelé no justice, writes Carlos Amato
KIDS are fairly wooden actors at the best of times. But when you make them say their lines in a foreign language, you end up with a cast of bedside tables.
This is the biggest of many own goals scored by the makers of Pelé: Birth of A Legend, which recounts the great Brazilian footballer’s emergence as a teenage prodigy in the late 1950s. The English dialogue spoken by mostly Brazilian actors ensures a fundamental phoniness. The screenplay would have been just as clunky in subtitled Portuguese, but we might have had a better chance of occasionally suspending our disbelief.
It’s a pity, because the myth of Pelé deserves better than this patronisingly linear biopic for kids. Edson Arantes de Nascimento’s genius revolutionised football, ignited Afro-Brazilian consciousness and redefined Brazil in the eyes of the world. The directors, Jeff and Michael Zimbalist, do their best to capture his significance as a national redeemer, but their efforts are as crude as a hoofed clearance to Row Z. The match seems fixed with every touch.
But it’s all gorgeously shot and designed, and the football sequences provide frequent and welcome relief from the script. We begin in Bauru, a verdant shanty town in São Paulo state, where the nineyear-old hero and his mates warn us of the implausibility ahead with a zero-gravity game of keepy-uppy. Young Pelé (Leonardo Lima Carvalho) soon leads his barefoot brigade in a youth tournament against a team of middle-class white kids — whose snooty captain, Jose Altafini, disdains Pelé’s expressive, ball-juggling “ginga” style of football.
Ginga means “sway” in Brazilian Portuguese, and the film makes the contestable claim that it’s the direct legacy of capoeira, the gyrating martial art disguised as dance invented by slaves and maroons. The ginga tradition was blamed by the establishment for the national team’s humiliation at the 1950 World Cup by Uruguay — and the new dream is to play a rigidly European style, in which individual flair is suppressed. Pelé’s mission is to stick it to the Eurocentrics and reboot Brazil’s footballing soul. May the ginga be with him.
As a 15-year-old (now played by Kevin de Paula) Pelé joins the São Paulo giants Santos. Initially dismayed by a judgy gingaphobic coach, he gets his mojo back by visualising his formative keepy-uppy sessions with his dad Dondinho (played with charm by the great singer-songwriter Seu Jorge), an exfootballer whose career was wrecked by injury.
Back in Bauru, father and son performed their footie feats with mangos instead of balls, giving us an extended, fruit-based remix of
The Karate Kid and The Matrix. When Pelé is picked at 17 for the 1958 World Cup in Sweden, the stage is set for his pleasantly cheesy reconciliation with Altafini (now a national teammate, played by Diego Boneta) and some engaging re-enactments of Pelé’s astonishing performances in the tournament. But the climax is buttered so thickly with nationalist and familial emotion that you feel like a stone-hearted curmudgeon for resisting it.
Maybe the problem is that such an astonishing sporting triumph is unimprovable when it happens in reality. Any fictional replay is a pale shadow.
It’s telling that the greatest football movie ever made was Tom Hooper’s The Damned United, in which Michael Sheen plays the eccentric manager Brian Clough during his brief, doomed reign at Leeds United. If you really want to plumb the emotional depths of the game, you have to confront defeat.
Pelé: Birth of A Legend is on circuit
The football sequences provide frequent and welcome relief from the script