Actors volley at the net
Emma Stone, Steve Carell re-create the Riggs-King tennis spectacle
The 1973 tennis match between Bobby Riggs and Billie Jean King was one of those crazy American events, a zany and outlandish spectacle that was, at heart, not a joke at all. Even at the time, people knew that Riggs and King would be remembered forever for this match, which became a flash point in American culture and remains a weird emblem of its era.
“Battle of the Sexes” tells the story of that match and of the events leading up to it. For those not old enough to remember it firsthand — at this point, that’s most people — it captures the big day’s excitement and reminds us of its importance. This was something that everyone watched and almost everybody cared about. But the movie does more than do justice to a memory or introduce people to a curious moment in cultural
history. It places it in context and deepens our understanding of it.
For King (Emma Stone), the match crystallized, in a form bordering on farce, the real struggle she’d been spearheading to have women’s tennis taken seriously. At considerable risk to her career, she had just recently led an insurrection of women’s tennis players, who’d been making an eighth of the prize money paid to their male counterparts. As part of their protest, King and her band of insurgents had started their own tennis association, one that was just getting off the ground when Riggs (Steve Carell) entered her life.
To add even more pressure, this was right at the time King was realizing that she was a lesbian, something she understandably wanted to conceal from her husband and emphatically needed to conceal from the general public. This was an era in which “women’s lib” was itself a contentious subject. For a young celebrity already challenging the establishment and generating controversy, coming out as a gay was hardly an option.
All this is dramatized expertly and with a lightness of touch in Simon Beaufoy’s screenplay and in the direction of Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, the team behind “Little Miss Sunshine.” Dayton and Faris re-create the era, not just the hair and the cars and the clothes, but also the music. Most period soundtracks concentrate on those songs we still remember today. But in “Battle of the Sexes,” you will hear, for example, “Joy” by Apollo 10 — a top-40 hit, based on Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,” that no one has heard or thought about in four decades. But people heard it then.
Today, Billie Jean King is regarded as one of the greats, not only a consummate athlete, but also a person who devoted herself to advancing the cause of women in sports. But wisely, Stone doesn’t play greatness. She plays a young woman stumbling into importance almost by accident, as a consequence of certain conditions and of a personality that just won’t accept injustice. For her, it’s all a grand improvisation, one day into the next. And then one fine afternoon, she goes for a haircut and the stylist (Andrea Riseborough) starts sensuously touching her head and her neck and caressing her hair. So all at once there’s yet another complication and another possible challenge to her athlete’s focus and concentration.
Then there’s Bobby Riggs, a former tennis champion and now a 55-year-old hustler and gambler. Riggs gets a milliondollar idea, to play the greatest female tennis champion in the world and bill it as the “Battle of the Sexes.” His concept was that if an “old man,” as he called himself, could beat the very best women’s tennis player in the world, it would forever prove men’s superiority. King refuses Riggs’ offer at first, but soon the pressure mounts, as King realizes she must either beat Riggs or set women’s tennis back decades.
As Riggs, Carell is as fun as the real Bobby Riggs — and that’s saying a lot. The real Riggs was a nonstop talker and a shameless self-promoter, but he was in on the joke, and there was something warm and vulnerable beneath his bluster. If you were to watch a documentary about the match, you might see him saying appalling things about women being useful only in the kitchen and the bedroom. But this was an act, and in 1973, almost everyone knew it. Carell brings these qualities out in his performance: the relentlessness, the drive and the odd, underlying lovability that made many people root for Riggs, even fans who liked and admired Billie Jean King.
Yet for all Riggs’ intentional silliness, something real was at stake here. Riggs may have been clowning his way to a major payday, but he still wanted to win, and his bluster had positioned him to do serious damage to women in tennis — and not only tennis. The movie shows and makes audiences feel how this battle of the sexes brought out real tensions between men and women, and between the forces of modernity and tradition. Thus, King carried the fate of her sport onto the court with her, and in a strange and less tangible way, the fate of American women.
This makes “Battle of the Sexes” a big-canvas story, a piece of Americana exploring American life and attitudes at a moment of cultural transformation. But in its focus on King, it’s also a compelling internal story, demonstrating that athletic achievement is not only a matter of physical gifts. At the highest levels, where the pressure is greatest, it really comes down to character.