Smashing f ilm, shame about the facts
BATTLE Of The Sexes, the new film about the great tennis player Billie Jean King, is a terrific watch – funny, dramatic, clever and morally satisfying. You come out of the cinema surprised by how long you’ve been there, which doesn’t happen often.
But the more I looked into the actual events portrayed, the more I felt I’d been used and bamboozled. I have to be careful here or the Guardian newspaper will make up more lies about me. So let me say that I admire Billie Jean King as a sportswoman and as a tough campaigner for women’s freedom. I am also pleased she has found happiness in her life with a female partner.
I loathed the condescension and the legal restrictions still inflicted on women in the 1970s, and was personally and politically glad to see them swept away. And if that was all the film celebrated, I’d be content. But it wasn’t that simple. Billie Jean’s husband is rightly shown as a thoughtful and generous man. Yet the girlfriend who introduced Billie Jean to same-sex love is more than slightly idealised.
And another great tennis player of the age, Margaret Court, is portrayed as a sour and crabbed person. Could this be because she disapproved of the sexual revolution and has now become a minister in a very conservative church? I think it may be so.
Also, very little is made of the awkward, unavoidable fact that women’s tennis prospered because it was sponsored by cigarette brand Virginia Slims. Was the cause so good that this sordid bargain was justified? Slim cigarettes, as far as I know, still kill those who smoke them, and this was no secret in the 1970s. But perhaps most startling of all is the great match which is the climax of the film, when Billie Jean defeats the male-chauvinist braggart Bobby Riggs, so exploding his boasts of superiority.
But you’d never know from the movie that US media have explored, and not disproved, serious claims that Riggs, a habitual gambler with Mafia contacts, deliberately lost the game to pay off a large debt to the Godfather and his boys.
He’d easily beaten Margaret Court. So maybe it wasn’t as conclusive as all that. Why leave this out? Films about factual events, it seems to me, have a duty to stick as close to the truth as possible. Dramatic licence is fine, but not when it puts the audience in the dark about what really happened.