always play Two films about the games men will
Two films exploit the comedy of blokes and their leisure pursuits, but is there a more serious point?
In director Oliver Parker’s new film, Swimming with Men, Rob Brydon plays Eric, a sad-sack accountant whose life is seemingly without purpose.
Eric needs a reason to get up in the morning, and finds it one day at his local swimming baths, where he happens upon a practice session of an all-male synchronised swimming outfit. The team, which includes a number of British actors (Jim Carter, Tom Turgoose, Danny Mays, Adeel Akhtar and Rupert Graves), is in need of a new member, and Eric might just be the missing spoke in their semi-submerged wheel.
Over in glossy Hollywood, Jeremy Renner, Ed Helms and Jon Hamm are among the stars of Tag, a forthcoming comedy about a group of friends who have been playing a game of “it” for 30 years, and for whom any occasion — weddings, childbirth, funerals — is fair game. The joke, purportedly, is that men are glorified toddlers and that they can only relate to each other through the medium of structured leisure activities (see also: football).
Tag hadn’t screened at the time of writing, though Swimming with Men had, and turns out to be a sweet, predictable film (they should have just called it The Pool Monty) whose jokes are as tepid as the showers. But it is based on another one that’s worth digging out: a 2010 documentary by Dylan Williams, Men Who Swim, about his attempts to join an all-male synchronised swimming team in Sweden. Tag, similarly, is based on the true story of the “tag brothers” of Spokane, Washington, who started a game that lasted three decades (though the real-life incident of one of them being tagged while he accompanied his wife to chemo did not make the script).
And yes, it’s all a bit jokey, and yes, men are emotionally stunted, and yes, only just capable of functioning in polite society, but if it takes the reassuring parameters of organised fun to enable men to find each other, to open up, to express love, and to acknowledge, as one of the synchro team does, that
“we’ve all had our moments at the bottom of the pool”, then perhaps we women (oops, did I mention that?) should be prepared to suck it up.
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Tag is out now; Swimming
With Men is out on 6 July