Doco focuses on the football, not the controversies
Pele (13+, 108 mins) Directed by Ben Nicholas and David Tryhorn Reviewed by James Croot ★★★1⁄2
While his more controversial fellow Fifa World Player of the Century has been the subject of countless documentaries, the man born Edson Arantes do Nascimento is probably more famous televisually for appearing alongside Sylvester Stallone and Michael Caine in Escape to Victory.
Ben Nicholas and David Tryhorn’s tale aims to redress that balance, to finally tell the story of the man who scored 1283 goals in 1367 games and, more than anyone, made Brazil a country synonymous with flair-fuelled winning football, while selling everything in his native land from coffee to toothpaste.
Be warned though, those expecting a warts-and-all, soup-tonuts biography are likely to leave disappointed. The focus is very much on the 12-year period (1958 to 1970) when Pele and Brazil took home three World Cup titles, but as a primer to ‘‘the only footballer who surpassed the boundaries of logic’’ (as Dutch 1970s star Johan Cruyff described him), it certainly provides plenty of interest and insight.
Pele’s one true revelation comes at the first glimpse of the man himself, the now 80-year-old shuffling into frame with the help of a walker. It is sad to see the man who once danced rings around his opposition clearly struggling due to a combination of ongoing kidney problems and slow rehabilitation from a hip operation.
However, it’s quickly clear that his mind is still sharp, as he recollects his rise from being a young boy who simply wanted to emulate his club footballer father Dondinho and help out his struggling family by shining strangers’ shoes, to Santos and Brazil’s all-time leading goalscorer.
Impressive archival footage and interviews with his team-mates and journalists help give a full picture of just what he meant to his club and country.
Before Brazil went off to the 1958 World Cup in Sweden, it wasn’t known as a footballing powerhouse, despite making the final eight years earlier (a loss to bitter rivals Uruguay which haunted many Brazilian’s like Pele’s dad). Pele recalls Swedish children coming up to him and touching his face, looking to see if his ‘‘dye’’ came off.
But, spearheaded by their 5ft 8in playmaker (who actually didn’t play until the third game of the tournament, something glossed over by the documentary), they swept to victory with a pair of 5-2 victories in the semifinal against France and the final against the hosts. It not only sparked wild celebrations back home, but kickstarted their domination of the global game for some time.
Despite considering myself a reasonable student of the game and its history, what surprised me was how little a part Pele actually played in Brazil’s trio of victories in four tournaments.
He was injured in just the second game of both the 1962 and 66 instalments (teams by the latter competition had worked out how to ‘‘nullify’’ his skills and influence) and would likely never have played in 1970, were it not for the then military dictatorship’s insistence that he go (an attempt to drop him had already cost at least one coach his job).
Nicholas and Tryhorn attempt to tease some opinions or admissions out of their subject, on his failure to condemn the brutal regime and his extra-marital affairs, but aside from revealing that he only found out about some of his children ‘‘much later’’, the probing and candour would best be described as light.
However, as one commentator puts it, the difference between Muhammad Ali (who famously spoke out against America’s involvement in Vietnam and other government decisions) and Pele was that the former didn’t really face the same threat of arrest or torture for such expressions.
Still, while you won’t learn anything about how he came to be called Pele (apparently because as a schoolboy he kept mispronouncing the name of his local club’s goalkeeper Bile) and there’s no mention of his later escapades at the New York Cosmos (check out the brilliant Once in a Lifetime for more on that), dramatic escape from Lagos during a military coup, corruption allegations, or work with Unesco, as a tightly focused look at one man’s influence and dominance of a global game for more than a decade, Pele is a more than entertaining watch.
Pele is now streaming on Netflix. Best viewed in Portuguese with English subtitles, rather than the awful English dub.