BALL BUSTER
IN 2002, Pittsburgh Steelers Hall of Fame center Mike Webster, who had been living in a pickup truck, was suffering from dementia, and could get to sleep only by blasting himself unconscious with a Taser, was found dead. The cause of death was football, according to the film “Concussion.”
Will Smith plays Dr. Bennet Omalu, the real-life coroner who obsessively examined Webster’s corpse looking for a clue to the man’s mental decay. The answer: CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy), a disorder discovered by Omalu that was invisible on CT scans. Omalu concluded that repeated head trauma over a period of years was causing CTE, which in turn was leading great ex-NFL players to schizophrenia, depression and suicide.
Smith’s Omalu is an aristocratic, awkwardly formal Nigerian who knows nothing of football but pursues his research at considerable cost to himself out of pure scientific curiosity. Together with a pair of medical mentors (Albert Brooks and Alec Baldwin), he finds trouble: The National Football League, he decides, has been covering up what it knows about the long-term damage caused by the sport. And in slightly overheated dialogue, writer-director Peter Landesman underlines how you don’t want to go to war with football. “The NFL owns a day of the week,” explains Brooks, as Omalu’s boss. “The same day the church used to own.”
With its corny 1980s vibe, “Concussion” isn’t a great movie — it’s formulaic and predictable, slathered with dopey musical cues and sprinkled with contrived movie-ish dialogue, like “I can’t tell whether you are more afraid of what you will find or what you won’t.” Moreover, the love story between Omalu and another African immigrant (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) is so soft it feels less like a real romance than the second verse of a Celine Dion song.
Yet the film is sober, honest and serious about an important subject. What Omalu did took considerable courage: In one touching scene he explains that all he ever wanted to do was fit into American life, yet blameless scientific inquiry has made him an inadvertent traitor to his adopted culture.
“Concussion” is a bit vague, out of necessity perhaps, about what exactly the NFL knew about head injuries and when it knew it. Yet the lack of a single defined enemy — in essentially a cameo, Luke Wilson plays NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell — makes the film more interesting. It’s like Omalu is taking on a mode of thinking.
Little kids wouldn’t ask Omalu, he notes with resignation at the film’s end, “Why are you concerned about brain damage?” But rather, “Why do you hate football?”
In “Concussion,” Will Smith stars as Dr. Bennet Omalu, who exposed the potentially fatal side effects of playing football.