Serving up the back story
Retelling of tennis showdown reveals rivals’ deepest secrets
In Battle of the Sexes, a comedy that enhances history, Steve Carell’s Bobby Riggs brags of wanting to “put the show back into chauvinism” in his big-money tennis match with Billie Jean King (Emma Stone).
Success on that score is almost guaranteed for movie watchers, regardless of what they know going in about the 1973 Riggs versus King pairing that turned a refined sport into a gladiatorial contest of the genders.
The actors are expertly cast in look and manner: Carell as the clownish but crafty Riggs, a 55-year-old former Wimbledon champ and inveterate hustler; Stone as the serious and determined King, 29, a reign- ing superstar of women’s tennis and avatar of equality.
Even if you’ve googled the outcome, or are old enough to remember watching it on television, the film’s re-enactment of the battle and the bluster makes for entertaining and at times riveting viewing.
You might even be fooled into thinking you’re watching archival footage of the real tennis match, since the actors — aided by body doubles, computers and the taped voice of original TV announcer Howard Cosell — do such a convincing job of conjuring the look and sound of the event. Cinematographer Linus Sandgren shot on 35-mm film, contributing to Battle’s authentic 1970s sheen.
But just as Little Miss Sunshine was about more than a girl’s beauty pageant for co-directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, there’s more going on in their take on the $100,000 winner-take-all competition between the oinker and the striver before 30,000 people in the Houston Astrodome and an estimated 90 million worldwide on TV.
“It’s not your fault. It’s biology.” JACK KRAMER A TOP TENNIS EXEC TO BILLIE JEAN KING ABOUT GENDER-PAY GAP IN BATTLE OF THE SEXES
Dayton, Faris and screenwriter Simon Beaufoy ( Slumdog Millionaire, The Full Monty) delve into the largely unknown back stories of the two tennis combatants, sensitively bringing to the fore biographical elements often obscured by the reductive chauvinist versus feminist headlines of most historical accounts. This is a good thing, even if it means the film occasionally takes its eye off the ball, so to speak.
Riggs claimed the match with King was a lark (“I do it for fun,” the real Riggs told 60 Minutes at the time) but heavy gambling debts and a collapsing marriage (Elisabeth Shue plays his long-suffering wife) had him in dire need of a major score that might double as personal redemption.
King, meanwhile, was living a double life: she was the wife of tennis promoter Lawrence King (Austin Stowell) and also the closeted lover of her secretary Marilyn Barnett, whom Andrea Riseborough depicts as a free-spirited hairdresser in the film.
Billie Jean had good reason to hide her sexual orientation, since the battle for gay rights was still in its infancy, especially in the realm of sports. (Alan Cumming’s Ted Tinling, who designs the women’s outfits, emerges in the film as canny encouragement for King to be who she really wants to be.)
King was also on a solemn crusade to prove, all joking aside, women’s tennis was every bit the audience draw that men’s tennis was, despite the sexist attitudes of the era. She was spearheading a women’s tennis tour sponsored by Virginia Slims cigarettes — the players are managed in the film by Sarah Silverman’s deep-inhaling Gladys Heldman — and King needed to win the match against Riggs to help her maintain momentum.
She and Riggs both had something to prove, making them more alike than they realized at the time. (They later became lasting friends.)
In fact, the real villain of Battle of the Sexes isn’t the boasting buffoon at the net wearing the Sugar Daddy suit, but the smooth-talking shark in the boardroom: Bill Pullman’s Jack Kramer, a top tennis entrepreneur convinced that men are more “exciting” to watch than women, and thus deserving of being paid nearly 10 times the rate for female players.
“It’s not your fault,” he tells an enraged King. “It’s biology.”
Attitudes like that make for the real battle of the sexes, then as now.