Maradona’s story is the perfect soap
THis was a life that was partly Boy’s Own tale, part addiction tragedy and part tabloid hell
he Diego Maradona life story seems so tailormade for a soapy drama, and Amazon Prime Video has delivered with Maradona: Blessed Dream.
The diminutive genius has been dead for less than a year, but it feels longer: one of the sadnesses of his long decline being that his eventual demise at just 60 seemed that it had been inevitable many years previously. All things considered, he probably beat the spread to make it to 2020. This series, affectionate, thorough, glossy, picks up his story about 51 years earlier, as a boy marked out for immortality.
The drama series plots out many of the well-known staging posts in a life that was partly Boy’s Own tale, part addiction tragedy and part tabloid hell that must have had the scriptwriters thanking their lucky stars for the deep, murky well of source material.
The Argentine production, in Spanish with English subtitles, captures much of the magic and the devil in Diego, although this 5ft 5in football great remains a larger than life, mythic figure who resists subtler characterisation.
Maradona is played by various actors, with younger Diegos Nazareno Casero and Nicolas Goldschmidt both managing to nail the mischief, the joyousness and the chip on the shoulder of the slum kid propelled into the stratosphere. Plenty of strong work from the hairdressing department ensure the famous curls are recognisable, but the extraordinary physicality, that squat, impish yet freakishly explosive and compact frame remain as elusive as the man himself, gliding past hacking defenders.
Juan Palomino, as the Maradona of middle age and premature ruin, has the most obviously juicy part to get stuck into, and the actors involved in this are, by and large, not afraid of giving the scenery a nibble. This reviewer was watching it with subtitles and so there is a slight remove that makes it harder to calibrate the balance of truth and fiction in the telling. The expression that did spring to mind was “print the legend”: with a figure such as Maradona, what does it mean to sift out which bits are true, which are exaggerated, which are pure fabrication? Is it possible or necessary to try?
From the slums to Boca Juniors, to Barcelona and Napoli, the Mafia, the Hand of God, the World Cup, cocaine and tragedy, the story, or at least a lurid version thereof, will be familiar to most. Some figures are, perhaps, too big to paint with anything other than a broad brush.
As with any biopic of a legend, there are certain trademarks that the viewer expects to be served. Maradona the generous, the spiteful, the addict, the one-man team, the superstar, the poor boy manipulated and appropriated by greedy, powerful forces beyond his control. All these Diegos are here.
In the first three episodes – the ones made available for preview – there is sensibly little attempt to recreate anything on a pitch – who could possibly? – but judicious use of archive brings his greatness to light, and contextualises him in the terror and oppression of the late Seventies junta.
The Maradona name comes up most online these days in harmless, if inane, debates about who was the greater, versus previously Pele and now, of course, Lionel Messi. Messi has always come across a decent, bland figure, not unlike Sachin Tendulkar: entirely admirable but lacking in any particular interest other than what they do with the ball, and about whom only the most devoted fan could get through a 10-hour life story. In the age of constant scrutiny in which we now live, the sporting geniuses are surely going to be ever more Lionel and Sachin, rather than Diego or, say, George Best.
The temptations of fame, and the perils of unscrupulous managers and hangers-on will always be part of the story of the major sportsperson, but it is a mercy that at least Diego got to enthrall and horrify as he did before the age of social media. Whether we know him better or not after this series, it is a generous and enjoyable attempt at a memorial.
Maradona: Blessed Dream, Friday, Amazon Prime Video