MovieGuide Toy Story 4 and Diego Maradona reviewed; plus the 31st Galway Film Fleadh
★★★★ Dir: Asif Kapadia
Starring: Diego Maradona, Claudia Villafane
15A 130m
Following the success of Senna (2010) and Amy (2015), Oscar-winning director Asif Kapadia turns his attentions to another global icon for his latest documentary. Diego Armando Maradona is a football legend with the hand of God, a wand of a left foot and a finger on the button marked self-destruct. As in his previous films, Kapadia combines archive footage with contemporary audio interviews to construct his profile. In this case, he has five interviews with his subject and over 500 hours of unseen footage to play with. This includes rare clips of Maradona’s early life in the slums of Buenos Aires; and familiar clips at Mexico ’86 when the Hand of God moment, followed by that miraculous second goal against England, helped secure a second World Cup for La Albicelestes. The movie also touches on Maradona’s later, bloated, drug-ban years. Wisely, however, Kapadia’s film concentrates on Diego’s turbulent six seasons at Napoli, where the little maestro delivered a first ever Scudatto to a football-mad city starved for success. The price to be paid for the subsequent God-like status accorded him by hysterical Neapolitans included a total lack of privacy; a cocaine addiction; links with the Comorroa crime families and a party lifestyle that would wreak havoc on his body and his mental health.
Throughout this compelling documentary, Kapadia makes a distinction between ‘’Diego’’ and ‘’Maradona’’. Diego was the poor boy from the slums driven to succeed by a desire to look after his family; a role he assumed completely at the age of 15 when he signed his first major football contract. ‘’Maradona’’ was the win-at-all-costs footballer, who utilised both divine skills and devilish street-smarts (“football is a game of deceit,” he declares at one point), to realise the dreams of a club, a city and an entire nation. Diego Maradona is a remarkable account of a footballing Icarus who eventually flew too close to the sun but for a time, played the Beautiful Game like a God.