Jesse Owens’ story makes for compelling ‘Race’
Some real-life events couldn’t be more suited for movies, and the 1936 Berlin Winter Olympics is one of them. In a compressed period of days, everything good about sports came into collision with everything evil in politics. All the repulsive villains in the upcoming global catastrophe gathered together in a single location, only to find their aspirations thwarted by a single man, the American track and field athlete Jesse Owens.
The story of Owens and the Olympics is, in fact, so tailor-made for drama that the only creative risk is overdoing it, by making Owens a saint or the United States spotless, just to emphasize the contrast with Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany. Fortunately, “Race” doesn’t take that bait. Instead, the movie gives us a complex picture of an America that had its own racial problems in 1936, as well as a fleshand-blood portrait of Owens that leaves room for heroism but also shows his lusts and temptations and a star athlete’s ego.
This is a profound saga that makes for a great American movie, and the question that can’t help but spring to mind is why, oh why, was this not released in December, in time for Academy Awards consideration? Here’s a black-themed film that would almost certainly have been nominated in multiple categories, which could have at least undercut, if not curtailed, the current (and I think specious) argument that Oscar voters are racially biased.
The one-syllable title — “Race” — embodies much: the races Owens had to win, the racism that he had to endure and ignore at home, and the master-race madness that had infected a civilized European nation. To succeed, Owens had to match his physical discipline with a moral and emotional discipline almost as rare as his athletic gifts — and even more rare in a man only 22 years old.
“Race” takes time to make audiences feel the courage that Owens’ feats required, particularly in the simple yet remarkable sequence in which Owens enters the Berlin stadium on the day he is to compete. First, he is silhouetted against the packed stands, in a beautiful shot that seems purely heroic. But then the camera stays on him as he walks across the field, the crowd encircling him like the whole world shrunk down into a single space, like the judgment of history hovering and breathing on all sides. He sits down to tie his shoes, and the solitude of the
act catches you: How do you tie your shoes for the biggest 10 seconds of your life? How do you tie your shoes when one-tenth of a second can be the difference between legend and failure?
As the movie shows, the lead-up to that moment in history was fraught, and anything might have derailed it. The story begins with Owens going off to Ohio State University, where he has to ignore the taunts of the all-white football team and figure out how to send money back home. There’s a terrific use of sound in a locker room scene, in which Owens’ track coach (a warm Jason Sudeikis) teaches the young Owens how to block out crowd noise and stay focused on his goal.
Even as Owens was training, there was considerable controversy over whether the United States should even participate in a Nazi-run Olympics. The movie shows how Avery Brundage ( Jeremy Irons) of the Olympic Committee went to Berlin and bluntly told Josef Goebbels and other Nazi officials how they had to clean up their act if they wanted Americans to compete. Brundage is presented as a flawed but strong figure and is one of the movie’s most interesting characters, though the film glosses over the real Brundage’s own antiSemitism.
Stephan James, who played John Lewis in “Selma,” makes a satisfying and multidimensional Owens. He copies his running style (lots of short steps, with very little hang time in the air) and plays the man, not the legend. His Owens is young and vulnerable, distracted by sex and fame — he is known as the world’s fastest man even before Berlin — and subject to outside pressure. It’s amazing, the power of drama to make audiences worry about an outcome that is part of the historical record, but “Race” accomplishes just that.
Director Stephen Hopkins doesn’t clean up the past, not even literally. Windows go unwashed, and the world of 1936 looks real and livedin. Part of the movie’s pleasure is that of time travel, the ability to see an earlier era and the people who lived in it. Carice van Houten is a fascinating and believable Leni Riefenstahl, wary in her dealings with the Nazi hierarchy but fierce as a director in pursuit of art. Yet, strangely, little care was taken in the choice of a Hitler (Adrian Zwicker), who has the wrong haircut and is at least 10 years too young.
But “Race” gets the big things right, and in the story of the Berlin Olympics, nothing is bigger than the instant friendship that blossomed between Owens and his chief competitor in the long jump, Luz Long, who was German but no Nazi. Those brief scenes between the two young actors, James and David Kross, linger in the mind and are worthy of Long’s own words, written to Owens just a few years later, when World War II had already started: “Someday find my son. ... Tell him how things can be between men on this Earth.”