Stephen Hopkins (2016)
Race has an important subject and its title is a simply effective pun. The protagonist of this biographical drama is the great athlete Jesse Owens. The story naturally reaches its climax at the Berlin Olympics of 1936. The film’s central theme is the racism that disfigured not only the ‘Nazi Games’ but contemporary American life and sport too. Because you want such a movie to succeed, it’s pleasing that Race has done decent business at the North American box office (it cost $5m and has so far taken $22m). But Stephen Hopkins’s film, with a screenplay by Joe Shrapnel and Anna Waterhouse, is stunningly lacking in texture. It’s a succession of scenes that aim to do no more than make a point (usually just the one, often the same one) and move you on. You take the point; the film-makers tick off another item on their agenda.
Occasionally, Stephen Hopkins is so impatient that the effect is rather bizarre. A couple of days before a major national track and field event in 1935, Owens (Stephan James) is fooling around with some other athletes and sustains a leg injury. On the day of the meet, he can hardly walk and his coach Larry Snyder[1] (Jason Sudeikis) wants to pull him out. Owens persuades Snyder to let him run just the hundred yards. Once he hits tape in front, the will-he-won’t-he-compete mini-drama (though there are several more of these to come) is instantly supplanted by the racial prejudice one. The implication is that Owens has clocked a time faster than the official timekeeper is prepared to allow in the case of an African-American competitor, and Snyder argues the toss. Owens then wins the long jump, and a longer sprint, and a hurdles race. His bad leg is never mentioned again. By the end of the afternoon, his brilliance also seems to have erased suspicions of racism from Snyder’s and Stephen Hopkins’ minds.
Jesse Owens is defined in Race entirely by his ethnicity and his status in athletics history. Stephan Janes – who is just twenty-two, the same age Owens was when he won his four Olympic golds in 1936 – is likeable but impersonal. Jason Sudeikis is likeable too: he gives Larry Snyder rather more character although he’s lightweight – if he wasn’t, he’d risk seriously upstaging Stephan James. There’s scarcely a surprising detail in Race. That’s why, at the very end of the 134-minute movie, an actor called Frank Schorpion, on screen for less than one of those minutes, makes such an impact. Schorpion plays a hotel doorman. Owens and his wife Ruth (Shanice Banton) arrive, with Snyder and his lady, for a reception at the hotel. The reception is being held in Owens’ honour but the (white) doorman has to insist that he and his wife, because they’re black, use the back entrance. Frank Schorpion expresses a shamed sadness that’s real and startling in the context of Race as a whole.
It’s fortunate that, by this stage of the film, the Berlin Olympics have taken place and that the guts of these prove to be emotionally foolproof, in spite of Hopkins’ lacklustre staging. David Kross (best known for his role in The Reader) plays the German long jumper Luz Long intelligently and effectively (although the post-event dialogue between Long and Owens, in the former’s room, goes on too long). I wondered at the start how the film was going to present the controversial Avery Brundage but Jeremy Irons makes it pretty clear pretty soon he’s a wrong ‘un. (In the on-screen legends at the end of Race, Brundage is described as holding the ‘title’ of IOC President from 1952 until his death in 1975, as if, rather than being elected and re-elected to the office, he somehow appropriated it.) In contrast, the movie gives Leni Riefenstahl (Carice van Houten) too easy a ride. Because Riefenstahl’s Olympia was unquestionably a seminal piece of sports film-making, Stephen Hopkins seems prepared to accept that her love of cinema trumped her enthusiasm for National Socialism. (It seems Riefenstahl is so ahead of her time that, at one point, she’s shown screening footage from Olympia before she’s shot it.) Barnaby Metschurat is entertainingly creepy as Goebbels, while Adrian Zwicker’s Hitler sulks silently in his seat in the Olympic Stadium. The incontinent score (not her first) is by Rachel Portman.
15 June 2016
[1] Post-war, Larry Snyder coached, among others, Mal Whitfield and Glenn Davis, each of whom won three gold medals over the course of two Olympic Games.
