FEDERER DOCUMENTARY SERVES FEW SURPRISES
Film should have focused on the tennis legend’s on-court artistry, rather than his rather pedestrian personality.
One of the greatest pieces ever written about sport, and about tennis in particular, is the late David Foster Wallace’s 2006 The New York Times essay Roger Federer as Religious Experience, in which Foster Wallace, himself an avid tennis player, analyses the ways Federer’s tennis abilities completely redefined the sport and the physical possibilities of what could be achieved on the tennis court.
I was reminded of this piece several times while watching directors Asif Kapadia and Joe Sabia’s new documentary Federer: Twelve Final Days.
Foster Wallace, writing about “the Fed” at the peak of his powers, aged 25 and in the middle of what would become a career-best season, understood the genius and magic of his subject lay not in his biography but rather in his on-court artistry.
Kapadia and Sabia, following the final 12 days of their subject’s career in 2022 — from the announcement of his retirement to his final professional appearance as the doubles partner of his great rival and friend Rafael Nadal in the Laver Cup in London — try and fail dismally to make the case that Federer the man is as worthy a subject for consideration as the player.
A more arresting documentary would be found in the blueprint laid out 18 years ago by Foster Wallace’s essay, which, by subjecting Federer’s game to minute technical analysis within the broader context of the history of the sport and its previous heroes, demonstrates why he was such a phenomenon in a sport whose physical boundaries and possibilities seemed to have been pretty much set in stone before he came along.
As Foster Wallace noted in his essay, “Journalistically speaking, there is no hot news to offer you about Roger Federer … it’s all just a Google search away. Knock yourself out.”
While Kapadia and Sabia gain exclusive behind-the-scenes access to Federer and his team in the certainly bittersweet final days of his career, they don’t really use this to any real advantage, and the man we see is, even with a few tearful moments of sentiment shared in the company of his family and in the face of the reality of the end of his relationship with his adoring fans, pretty much the mildmannered, well-behaved, polite and stoically functional good guy we expect him to be.
As Federer himself admits, in one of the film’s rare moments of insight, even those moments when he seemed to have developed an angrier, tougher on-court persona were an act he knew didn’t represent his true nature.
There’s certainly some emotion to be had in watching a once seemingly unstoppable athlete having to come to terms with the realities of age and injury, bowing out with grace and in the glowing love of his fans and fellow players, but at the age of 41 and after increasing problems with his knee, there weren’t any other options available to him, so the trajectory of his final 12 days is familiar and expected, offering few surprises.
Unlike in Kapadia’s other celebrated sports documentaries about Ayrton Senna and Diego Maradona, which used extensive and fascinating archive material to demonstrate the contradictions between their private and public lives, and the tragic consequences of these, in this production there’s too little exploration of potentially fascinating archive material of Federer’s on-court magic, which we only briefly glimpse before returning to the frankly dull footage of him in luxury cars, hotel boardrooms and offices, watching his phone.
Ultimately, what could have been a timely reminder of the genius of Federer turns out to be a staid and sanitised, pre-approved glimpse into the damp squib that was the end of his career — 12 days that don’t deliver the drama the filmmakers and the title promise.
Federer: Twelve Final Days is streaming on Prime Video.