GENDER EQUITY NAME OF THE GAME

AT A time when Venus and Serena Williams reign supreme it’s difficult to visualise a time when the fight for gender equity in tennis was front-page news.

But Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris bring that era to life with verve and humour in Battle of the Sexes, a warm, earnestly entertaining film that revisits a pivotal 1973 match between a 55-year-old former Wimbledon champion named Bobby Riggs and 29-year-old tennis star Billie Jean King.

The showdown was a comeuppance in the form of performative kitsch, with the competitors arriving in the midst of Vegas-like fanfare and gaudy retinues.

For weeks, Riggs had been partying, pulling off stunts and playing the media.

King an intensely focused workhorse, had been busy working out, honing the precision shots that would prove lethal to her opponent’s shockingly lethargic game.

She beat him in straight sets, winning the $100 000 prize money and striking an epochal blow for women’s rights that made her an instant feminist icon.

Battle of the Sexes looks beneath the ballyhoo and horsing around to provide context on the heightened stakes that informed Riggs and King’s confrontation. Riggs comes across as a compulsive gambler eager to reclaim the spotlight and save his marriage. Carell and the film-makers are clearly having a ball as they re-create Riggs’ famous exhibition games, in which he handicapped himself by dressing as Bo-Peep and playing with skillets instead of rackets.

For her part, King – played in a less physically convincing but quietly sympathetic turn by Emma Stone – wasn’t explicitly political at all. She was simply interested in getting equal pay on the tennis circuit.

But when she establishes an instant erotic connection with a hairdresser named Marilyn, she realises that her sexual orientation may jeopardise the progress she’s been working for.

When the big night finally arrives, the actual tennis is a relative let down. The filmmakers don’t address long-held rumours that Riggs threw the game to pay off gambling debts. – Washington Post

Battle of the Sexes. Humorous: Emma Stone and Steve Carrell in