Advantage, Billie Jean
...but this riveting tale of her on-court clash with a male chauvinist begs the question have we really moved on?
Battle Of The Sexes Cert: 12A 2hrs 1min
Feature films take a long time to make, and when co-directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris began work on Battle Of The Sexes, the 2016 US Primaries were just getting under way and there seemed everychance the film would come out in the same year America got its first woman President.
Perfect timing, they must have thought, for a film that celebrates an earlier feminist milestone – the 1973 tennis match between self-styled ‘male chauvinist pig’ BobbyRiggs (a man who publicly opined that women belonged in the kitchen or bedroom but never on the tennis court) and Billie Jean King, the leading female player of her age.
So the fact that it actually comes out with Donald Trump in the White House and Hollywood consumed by sex scandals caused by abusive male film-makers should be a disaster for a film that intended to show just how far the feminist cause has come. But it’s not. In fact, Battle Of The Sexes has become a film that reveals just how little progress has been made and it’s all the better and more powerful for it. You can certainly see why it’s starting to generate some deserved pre-awards buzz. That said, it does begin a little slowly, as we are taken back to the sexist Seventies. It’s a time when new tennis tournaments dared to offer women players one-eighth of the prize moneythey offered the men and a male sports presenter would think nothing of draping his arm around the shoulders of the young female player he was interviewing. The casual sexism is almost more shocking than the institutionalised variety. But what slowly lifts it from the madefor-TV history lesson it could so easilyhave become is the quality of the performances. Emma Stone, last year’s winner of the Best Actress Oscar, of course, plays King, and is excellent as a woman who, at the age of 29, was just discovering who she was. King was sick and tired of playing by the men’s rules, particularly those laid down byJack Kramer (Bill Pullman), portrayed here as a sexist dinosaur who had
just set up the Association of Tennis Professionals. But when it became clear that female players would still be treated as second-class citizens, King – backed by the feisty businesswoman Gladys Heldman (an excellent Sarah Silverman) – promptly established the Women’s Tennis Association, with its own breakaway tour. In true Seventies fashion, it was quickly sponsored by a tobacco company.
But even as she was transforming women’s tennis, King was also coming to terms with her own sexuality, a battle that helpfully lends this potentially rather dry story some heart, emotional depth and even a smattering of sex, as King – seemingly a happily married woman – finds herself attracted to Marilyn Barnett (Andrea Riseborough), a free-spirited Californian hairdresser.
Arguably even better, though, is Steve Carell as Riggs, who has gone down in history as a chauvinist monster but who – courtesy of Carell’s sympathetic performance and Beaufoy’s well-researched screenplay – is entertainingly rehabilitated here.
Riggs was a Wimbledon and US Open champion back in the late Thirties and early Forties but also a lifelong gambler with a talent for deal-making and selfpromotion. Did he really believe half the sexist nonsense he spouted? Or was it just ticket-selling, ratings-boosting hype for a tennis match that would eventually attract a TV audience of 90 million? The fact that Riggs and King remained friends afterwards surely provides a strong hint.
Dayton and Faris, who already have Little Miss Sunshine to their name, direct without fuss or cinematic gimmick. The unshowy end result is a thoroughly watchable and thought-provoking picture that evocatively takes you back to the Seventies but never pretends that the battles being fought then have gone away, let alone been won. There are still arguments about equal prize money at tennis tournaments and there are many who would say that unless there’s a Williams or Sharapova on court, the women’s game has less box-office appeal now than it had then.
So while this early battle may be long over, the war definitely goes on.