Battle of the Sexes
Set the scene. It is 1973. Bobby Riggs, former tennis world champion, the wrong side of 50, a hustler with his marriage on the rocks and a gambling addiction bringing it all to the boil, challenges any professional female tennis player to a televised match. Billie Jean King, aged 29, world number one, paid one eighth of the salary of her male counterparts and shunted by patriarchal institutions at every turn, accepts. The event is watched by 90 million people.
At first, you are blinded by Emma Stone’s quiet but devastating portrayal of King, and Carell’s ludicrous machismo and explosive energy as Riggs, but all too quickly this movie hits you with the hard punches. For all its riotous anarchy this flick is primarily about the systematic oppression and pigeon-holing of women: everyone is trying to stamp King with their own brand of what she should be, those who want her to fight for social justice and those who want her to be powerless and domesticated. The gears are grinding and the film beautifully captures the electric build of pressure that comes before a revolution.
Battle of the Sexes risked being square if it had circled the theme of love triangles, but it rather artfully dodges that trope bullet. Going into the movie, you expect it to succumb to Rigg’s crass dichotomy of “male chauvinist pig versus hairy legged feminist”, but every character is heaped with nuance. For instance, we see Riggs relying on his wife as the breadwinner, despite telling all women to stay in the kitchen. We see how, despite resenting her marriage to Larry, Billie’s husband remains one of her greatest friends and supporters. We see prejudice lurking in the most seemingly harmless of comments, we see bigotry amongst allies and tenderness amongst opponents. The layers of perception rattle with the voices of commentators and cynics and supporters stacked on top of one another like a dusty pile of carpets. The romantic scenes between King and Marilyn Barnett (Andrea Riseborough) are touching and the way the story finds romance in the tiniest of details is amazing, most notably a haircut depicted as intimately as foreplay.
With its glossy varnish of vibrant colours, this bustling tapestry of a movie made me nostalgic for an era I never even lived in. But directors Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton (Little Miss Sunshine) don’t just stop there. For them this wasn’t merely a celebration of elaborate sets and costumes, but an impressionist painting of a particular time, movement and cornerstone of history. The use of grainy filters and blurred shots that smear colour across the screen like thick brushstrokes, plus many scenes shown through television sets, turns you instantly from 21st Century audience to 1970s spectator. It’s a movie that gives you room to cosy up in its aesthetic with a warm blanket and mug of hot chocolate for a precious few hours.
Whilst the eponymous tennis match is the nub of the piece, this isn’t really a sports success story, it could have shown every gruelling second of the match, complete with constant close-ups of perspiration and Riggs’ quivering sideburns, but this is a much bigger story than that. It’s as much about those in the margins as those in the limelight. The match was one pebble dropped in the centre of a lake, and the film captures the shockwaves that ripple and surge outwards.
Battle of the Sexes cuts you a big fat slice of history and dumps it unceremoniously on your plate. It takes a forward dive and triple backflip into the past and comes up gasping. It makes you proud of landmark social progress achievements such King’s victory and pleads urgently that more can still be done.
9/10
