Old Yorker

  • Borg vs McEnroe

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Janus Metz (2017)

    For those of us who follow tennis throughout the year, British Wimbledon-centrism can be irritating.  The sustained success of Andy Murray – a British standard-bearer to follow wherever he’s playing – has resulted in a positive change in media coverage but there’s a persisting public tendency to see Wimbledon, because it’s the most important tennis tournament, as the only tennis tournament.  Januz Metz’s Borg vs McEnroe, with a screenplay by Ronnie Sandahl, should go down well with this kind of audience.  The classic 1980 Wimbledon final between the two title characters, played by Sverrir Gudnason and Shia LaBeouf respectively, is, as well as the film’s climax, its continuing focus (interspersed with flashbacks to Borg’s and McEnroe’s younger selves).  There’s no suggestion that the world’s two top-ranked players have met in competition before (their first Wimbledon meeting was actually their eighth tournament contest).  Björn Borg’s supremacy is presented as unqualified (although he’d won four consecutive Wimbledons from 1976 to 1979, it was only in the last of those years that he’d overtaken Jimmy Connors as world number one for a decent length of time).  There’s never a mention of the US Open (which McEnroe had won for the first time in 1979 and which Borg never won), let alone the Australian Open (which, to be fair, didn’t, in the 1970s, have the cachet that it now enjoys, although it was always technically one of the four Grand Slam events).  We briefly see Borg on red clay but he’s practising on a court in Monte Carlo, where he lives, rather than playing at Roland Garros (text on screen at one point does record that he won his first French Open in 1974). 

    Borg vs McEnroe makes for much easier viewing than the real thing was.  If it matters to you who wins a best-of-five-sets tennis match, it’s murder to watch, especially because of the time it often takes.  In recent years, it’s become a tradition for me to go for a very long Sunday afternoon walk whenever Roger Federer is in the Wimbledon final.  (That’s a good few walks by now.  The most unforgettably rewarding one came in 2007, when Federer beat Rafael Nadal – or the Antichrist, as I tend to call him – in five sets.  This year’s outing, mirabile dictu, was the shortest since 2005.)  Although there’s never been anyone quite like Federer, Björn Borg is second on my all-time-favourites list (with his compatriot Stefan Edberg third).  In the 1970s and early 1980s, I was emotionally engaged in women’s tennis too, to an extent I never have been since.  I was a fervent Evonne Goolagong-Cawley supporter; the day before the Borg-McEnroe match in 1980, she had – at last – won her second Wimbledon, beating Chris Evert (Mrs John Lloyd as she then was).  That was enough nervous tension for one weekend.  I’d have been more than happy to go on a hike for the Saturday afternoon of the men’s final.  But I’d invited a friend round to the bedsit I rented in Willesden Green specifically to watch the match (he didn’t have a television at the time):  in the circumstances, even I couldn’t absent myself and leave John to it.  The consolation was that he was a serious Borg fan too.  We sat and suffered for four hours but, of course, it was worth it.

    The best thing about Borg vs McEnroe is that, thirty-seven years on, the right man still wins the match (1-6 7-5 6-3 6-7 (16-18) 8-6).  The film thus offers the unusual pleasure of a guaranteed and credible happy ending but there are a couple of potent stings in the tail.   Janus Metz and Ronnie Sandahl modify the popular myth that the two players were temperamentally polar opposites – Iceborg vs Superbrat.  As a junior player, Borg is just as prone to tantrums as McEnroe.  The teenage Borg eventually obeys the instruction of Lennart Bergelin (Stellan Skarsgård), who coached him throughout his career, never to show emotion on court but it continues to be a different matter behind the scenes.  Janus Metz stresses the stresses in the hero’s relationships with his fiancée Mariana Simionescu (Tuva Novotny) and with Bergelin; under the intense pressure of trying for a fifth consecutive Wimbledon win, Borg is often arguing with them, and battling his demons.  The textual postscript to the movie notes his retirement from tennis at the age of only twenty-six.  There’s no mention of his afterlife but plenty of the audience will be aware that it’s often been a difficult one – a story (a media story, at any rate) of failed marriages and business ventures, rumours of a drugs habit, an alleged suicide attempt.  The personal tensions the film describes give an edge to Borg’s lack of visible emotion during the match against McEnroe.  Awareness of what happened in later years induces a knottier feeling of sadness watching Borg on the screen.

    Watching John McEnroe and reflecting on his afterlife, and changed perceptions of him, produce a different kind of regret.  His friend and long-time doubles partner Peter Fleming, enjoying an unusually good run of form in singles in 1980, was McEnroe’s opponent in the Wimbledon quarter finals.  In the locker room after the match, Fleming (Scott Arthur) tells McEnroe that, in the long run, no one will remember him kindly because no one likes him.  If only.  McEnroe’s behaviour in the final itself was beyond reproach; the film suggests it was this that transformed his public image for good.  If only again.  With the passage of time, McEnroe’s outbursts at court officials have become part of Wimbledon lore – and nostalgia.  He’s remembered as a great player but, because he shouted and screamed, even more as a great ‘character’.  The perennial crown jewel in the BBC team at Wimbledon (he’s a highly articulate and often perceptive analyst), McEnroe nowadays chuckles along with his fellow commentators at the delightful memories of his you-cannot-be-serious days.  He’s proved to be a lamentably influential pioneer of ‘self-expression’ in tennis:  he may even have paved the way for intra-rally ululation, though he didn’t himself grunt or squeal when he hit a shot.  There’s an interesting bit in Borg vs McEnroe when Borg and Bergelin are watching McEnroe, in an early round at Wimbledon, on TV.  McEnroe gets angry, Bergelin declares excitedly that ‘He’s lost it’ but Borg disagrees.  It’s a short sequence and Metz may intend it simply to illustrate how anxiously keyed up Borg already is but I think it says a lot more, even if it doesn’t mean to.  I don’t doubt that McEnroe started out in tennis with genuine anger management issues but I think he discovered getting mad pumped him up helpfully during a match.  As I recall, McEnroe never misbehaved against Borg.  He didn’t need to – this was the one opponent against whom he was always sufficiently motivated.

    The film isn’t short of daft and/or lame touches.  The courtside commentators – especially a hearty English chap (David Bamber), who takes pride of place over assorted other nationalities – rank high in the daft category.  As you’d expect in this kind of story, there’s plenty of exposition.  A summary of how a tiebreak works is sensible; a conversation in which Vitas Gerulaitis (Robert Emms) tells McEnroe well-known facts about Borg – details of his manifold superstitions, the name of his girlfriend etc ­– is merely clumsy.  This is a Swedish film, which could explain (and excuse) why it doesn’t realise how ludicrous David Bamber sounds.  It also makes you appreciate this isn’t, in the country in which it was made, any old sports biography:  Björn Borg is Sweden’s greatest-ever international sportsman.  (His only credible rival is the alpine skier Ingemar Stenmark, Borg’s virtual contemporary.)   In spite of its title in the Anglophone world, the film is primarily about Borg.  Its Swedish release title – Borg – reflects that.  So does the careful casting of the main role.

    There are three ages of Borg:  Leo Borg [sic] plays him from the age of nine to the age of thirteen; Marcus Mossberg, who appears more briefly, is the older teenager; Sverrir Gudnason is the adult.  Even though the actors don’t facially resemble each other closely, there’s a credible continuity from one Borg incarnation to the next.  The personality that Leo Borg creates leaves a lasting impression that chimes with Sverrir Gudnason’s emotional portrait.  Gudnason bears a striking resemblance to Borg:  the actor has more regular, conventionally handsome features but these help reinforce the Viking hero aspect of the character.  He gets Borg’s round-shouldered slouch well.  In the Wimbledon action sequences, I wasn’t always sure when we were seeing Gudnason and when Henrik Sillanpää, credited as Borg’s ‘tennis double’.  (Or whether it was sometimes the real thing:  if there are inserts of actual match footage, they’ve been skilfully worked into the reconstruction of the final, filmed at a tennis arena in Prague.)  Either Gudnason or Sillanpää or both have done a brilliant job of replicating Borg’s court movement, especially on the forehand side.

    A couple of the early scenes in Monte Carlo are excellent – they have the ring of truth rather than of biopic.   Borg looks out from the balcony of a high-altitude apartment on the distant view below.   He moves forward onto the balcony railing as if preparing to throw himself off it, then into an extraordinary, very hazardous-looking, arm-strengthening exercise, using the railing.  Finding that he’s locked out of his car and desperate to avoid autograph hunters and other passers-by who call out and point at him, Borg takes refuge in a bar and orders a coffee.  He asks the bartender if he can pay later as he has no cash on him:  his wallet’s in the car.  The bartender says no but that if the customer can do a quick bit of manual labour – carrying boxes around and so on – that’ll do instead of money.  Borg obliges.  The two men have a conversation.  The superstar leaves the place without the bartender having a clue who he was.

    Although in his late thirties, Sverrir Gudnason is entirely convincing as an athlete in his mid-twenties.  The actual age difference between him and Shia LaBeouf, thirty when the film was shot, is greater than that between Borg and McEnroe yet LaBeouf seems much too old for Superbrat.  More specifically, his face looks longer and thinner than McEnroe’s, with its traces of puppy fat, did at the time; when he imitates McEnroe’s facial expressions, LaBeouf looks either miserable or mentally defective – he’s quite lacking in dynamic truculence.  (Paul Theroux memorably described the young McEnroe on court as ‘looking like a slightly swollen Shirley Temple playing Hiawatha on the warpath’.)  It seems that LaBeouf was attracted to the script partly because, with his own ‘bad boy’ media image, he empathised with McEnroe.  He doesn’t give a bad performance but he’s not helped by the McEnroe role being sketchier and more impersonally written than Borg’s.   There’s nothing to compare with the above-mentioned scenes in Monte Carlo; instead, we’re asked simply to note, for example, that McEnroe’s parents (Ian Blackman and Jane Perry) are unreasonably demanding of success – are, in other words, the root cause of their son’s screwed-up antics.  Whereas there are two young Borgs, there’s only one junior McEnroe.  Jackson Gann, who plays him, looks to be eleven or twelve.  In one scene, we see that young John has an autographed photo of Borg.  Even allowing that the latter was a precociously successful talent, winning his first French Open a few days before his eighteenth birthday, this pre-adolescent’s fan picture doesn’t make sense – Borg was less than three years older than McEnroe.

    The film’s version of the great match is somewhat anti-climactic because Metz tries to make it continuously, spectacularly exciting.  Tennis has an ingenious scoring system:  every point counts but only the last point counts.  That doesn’t mean, though, that every point is a thriller that has the crowd on their feet:  what’s often striking is that a sequence of points, each of them unremarkable individually, has slipped by in a way that alters the course of a game or set beyond recall.  The need for non-stop excitement at Wimbledon is a modern invention, epitomised by changes in commentary style.  In 1980, the BBC’s senior commentator Dan Maskell spoke just enough to keep viewers informed and to exclaim in admiration at great shots or in regretful disbelief at bad ones.  Nowadays, most of the BBC commentary box carry on a nearly non-stop conversation between points (it occasionally continues even during points).  The commentators are hyper-alert to shifts in the direction that a match is taking – in other words, they invent them.  They seem nervous that viewers will get bored unless there are frequent swings in momentum (as well as peripheral ‘entertainment’ in the form of the weirder sights among the Centre Court crowd, etc).

    These commentary tactics, no doubt dictated by audience research findings, are presumably an international phenomenon – and Janus Metz seems to be demonstrating in Borg vs McEnroe the present-day requirement of thrill-a-minute tennis.  In doing so, he fails to capture the shape and subtler fluctuations of the 1980 final:  the shocking ease with which McEnroe won the first set;  Borg’s patience in working his way back into the match; his inexorable progress to what looked sure to be a victory in four sets; McEnroe’s unexpected, repeated resistance in the tenth game of the fourth set and in the subsequent tiebreak;  Borg’s strength of will in overcoming the disappointment of seven championship points going west, reflected in his superb service games in the final set.  The fluctuating fortunes during the 34-point tiebreak were, inevitably, rapid and thrilling but in Borg vs McEnroe, they’re just the latest in an unbroken sequence of highlights.  The crowd in the movie goes as wild when Borg serves an ace at the start of the second set as when he hits the crosscourt backhand pass that sealed victory on his eighth championship point.  Excited involvement in a match, in those days, tended to be expressed through intense quiet rather than by voices in the crowd baying for their man or woman.  If you watch the last game of the 1980 final on YouTube, you’ll notice that the umpire never needs to issue a ‘Quiet, please’.  The hush is integral to the excitement.  Metz misses this crucial element.

    The film is in two minds about McEnroe’s popularity.  There’s a suggestion he’s a media sensation because so many people identify with him as a ‘rebel’; then that everyone in Britain hates him; then shots of wildly enthusiastic McEnroe supporters during the Wimbledon final (they can’t  already have been converted by his impeccable conduct that day).  I wonder what McEnroe aficionados feel about Borg vs McEnroe.  They must recognise that the 1980 final was the greatest match between their man and Borg, at the same time as being galled that the film concentrates on the only one of the pair’s four Grand Slam finals that the Swede won.  I came out of the cinema hoping I don’t live to see a movie about the Federer-Nadal rivalry.  If that were to focus on one of their three Wimbledon finals (to date), it would obviously, alas, be 2008.  On the other hand, if it was a Swiss-made film about a national hero …

    17 September 2017

  • Mother!

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Darren Aronofsky (2017)

    There were plenty of personal prejudices to subdue.  This is a film whose title ends in an exclamation mark (and even begins with a lower-case letter but let’s ignore that, as IMDB does).  Its principal characters, nameless in the action, are listed in the cast as Mother and Him.  The plot involves surprise visitors to a private house making themselves at home and wreaking havoc.  The director (and writer) is Darren Aronofsky.

    Mother! is a horror mystery in which, according to IMDB, ‘A couple’s relationship is tested when uninvited guests arrive at their home, disrupting their tranquil existence’.  But Aronofsky is too impatient to bother with suspense:  the existence of Mother (Jennifer Lawrence) and Him (Javier Bardem) is never tranquil.  In his first appearance on screen, Him places a multi-faceted piece of crystal on display and observes it with enigmatic satisfaction – a reliably bad sign.  Mother is uneasy from the moment she wakes alone in bed and calls out for Him.  The interior lighting is glum and the camera prowls ominously round the place.  The homestead, of course, stands in the middle of nowhere:  Mother gets up and stands at an open door, looking out at an appealing gold and green landscape distant enough to appear utterly inaccessible. When the couple converse Him’s smiling reassurance seems automatic and phony.   Within a few screen minutes, Mother is seeing things that disturb her outside and inside the house, including a heart beating within a wall.  The often hand-held camera is oppressively tight on the characters’ faces, to claustrophobic effect.  In short, there’s no domestic bliss for malign forces either external or internal to destroy.

    Him is a famous poet suffering from writer’s block.  Mother is doing up their big, empty house.  (Even the sounds of plaster being mixed and applied to a wall are doom-laden.)  Him explains to their first caller, Man (Ed Harris), that he (Him) lost everything when his previous home burned down.  All that survived the inferno was that piece of glassy crystal.  Then Mother entered Him’s life and restored his happiness.  We can be confident from this point onwards – especially since Aronofsky preceded the first shot of Him and crystal with a close-up of a woman’s burning face – that the narrative is going to be cyclical.  We can be sure too, from the moment Him asks Man not to touch the crystal, that the house guests – Man is soon followed by his wife Woman (Michelle Pfeiffer) – will break it.  Him’s nervousness about the precious object is the only thing that qualifies his warm welcome of the unexpected arrivals.  Mother, in contrast, is immediately wary of them and, in due course, vindicated.  Man is a chain smoker with a shocking cough to prove it and, Him tells Mother, not long to live.  Man and Woman have two sons.  Younger Brother (Brian Gleeson) arrives, in a panic, jabbering about a disputed will; disinherited Oldest [sic] Son (Domhnall Gleeson) is hot on his heels.  They fight; Younger Brother is mortally injured and rushed to hospital by Him, Man and Woman.  When they return, the parents are dressed in mourning.  Lots of other strange people then arrive to attend a wake for Younger Brother (though not the police to look into the circumstances of his bloody death).  Mother finally loses patience and kicks them all out.  She then berates Him not just for letting strangers overrun the place but for being impotent.  This goads him into sexual action.  The following morning, a beatifically smiling Mother announces that she’s going to have a baby – she just knows.  The news instantly gets rid of Him’s writer’s block:  he leaps out of bed and starts scribbling away.  (Literally scribbling:  a keyboard wouldn’t be poetic enough.)

    This is only the half of it – the next invaders arrive several months later, in much greater numbers, just as heavily pregnant Mother is putting the finishing touches to a candlelit dinner for two to celebrate the publication of Him’s masterpiece:  the ensuing, cataclysmic mayhem sends her into labour.  But it’s enough to give an idea of how Mother! operates throughout.  It’s a ragbag of clichés and culturally pretentious allusions.  Darren Aronofsky is too smart not to know the clichés are clichés and his knowingness seems meant to elevate his use of them, even though the clichés aren’t otherwise transformed or reactivated.  The Biblical echoes are no less obvious – the Cain and Abel routine, Him’s Jesus-style welcome to all-comers:   he insists to Mother that Man, Woman et al have nowhere else to go.  But this altruism is fused with Him’s not-so-Christlike appetite for enjoying his celebrity:  Man is a fan of Him – so are many among the later hordes of gatecrashers.

    Although the direction and writing share a lack of discipline, they’re also significantly different.  The script is laughable, especially in the portrait of Him.  This man has to be A Poet – a novelist would be, in every sense, too prosaic for Darren Aronofsky’s purpose.  Given the actual level of poetry sales nowadays, it’s actually very understandable that Him is happy for myriad readers to beat a path to his door, though I doubt that’s the point Aronofsky means to make.    You have to admit too that Him understands the tricky thing about literary creation:  as he resumes writing, he tells Mother, ‘I know what I want to say – I just need to find the words to say it’.  Why he says this is a puzzle, though:  according to the film, the mere act of putting pen to paper equates to making successful art.  Perhaps a misapprehension that the two things are the same explains how Mother! got written (it’s the first time Aronofsky has had sole screenplay credit).  Even though the script is tosh, you nevertheless feel it might be a reasonably entertaining read.  As a writer, Aronofsky is a thieving (and tasteless) magpie but at least his bad ideas are reliably half-baked:  his attention soon wanders on to something else.  What sinks the film is that, as a director, he’s a blunt instrument – relentless and emphatically unvarying.  He’s soon at a climactic pitch, tries and fails to up the ante, but keeps pushing.  As a result, Mother!, a two-hour bludgeoning, is exceptionally tedious.  Someone a couple of rows ahead of me at Curzon Soho switched their phone on well before the end.  I had to keep raising my hand to block out the offending screen yet it wasn’t just cowardice that stopped me asking for it to be turned off.   Even though I was glad when another audience member eventually did that, part of me couldn’t help thinking this unforgivable behaviour was what Mother! deserved.

    There were two aspects I was confident of engaging with – Jennifer Lawrence and her character’s alarm at the invasion of her space.  A theatrical release poster (there appears to be more than one version) gives Lawrence a Madonna look – but a kitsch Madonna rather than an art-history masterpiece one.  The waxen immobility of the actress’s face on the poster is unfortunately predictive of her fate in the film.  Lawrence is eminently well equipped to play an intrepid resister but gets little opportunity to do so here:  once Mother has advised Man that the house is a no-smoking area and he virtually ignores her, the star spends most of her time unavailingly telling people what not to do and miming horror at the appalling consequences of their disobedience.  Aronofsky’s direction, monopolising and monotonous, flattens out the gradations of horror so that Lawrence’s performance, though game, is repetitive.  The sulphurous yellow powder that Mother dissolves in water and gulps down whenever things get too much is no help.  There’s a single, exhilarating moment that reminds you of what might have been if the role had been better written – when the pregnant heroine reacts excitedly to feeling the baby move inside her for the first time.  She may be one of Hollywood’s highest-paid actresses but Jennifer Lawrence isn’t an icon in the two-dimensional sense of the word.  Deprived of material with which to humanise the woman she’s playing, she is seriously diminished.

    Although strongly sympathetic to the protagonist’s preference for her own company, I wondered, about halfway through, whether there might eventually be a twist that confirmed Mother – the unsociable, humourless interior decorator – as deserving of comeuppance.   Then I wondered if the film might turn into a misogynist fantasy comedy, predicated on the idea that women naturally need to give birth and are paranoid until they’ve actually achieved motherhood.  I needn’t have worried on either count: Aronofsky has grander ideas, whatever they may be.  It’s evident from reviews that Mother! is open to different readings.  The man who made it may enjoy that, as well as the very mixed notices the film is getting.  He may be vain enough to confuse his mess of themes and motifs, and what people make of these, with rich complexity; and hostility to Mother! as proof that he’s stirring up troubling feelings in, and thereby challenging, the audience.  Encouraged by Aronofsky’s presentation of the title character in Noah as an eco pioneer, several critics have interpreted this new film as an environmental allegory – a story of the damage that reckless humankind is doing to the planet that Mother Nature has made so beautiful, even though this doesn’t quite fit with Mother Lawrence being such a reluctant hostess.  I found it easier to see the movie as an hysterical critique of a well-known brand of creative artist – egocentrically single-minded, insatiable for praise at any cost, prepared to tear the heart out of those who love and inspire him.  Darren Aronofsky may even see Him as a self-portrait.  Perhaps Mother! is a vanity project of a very peculiar kind.

    15 September 2017

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