Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris (2017)

You’d think the story of the 1973 tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs would be effortlessly entertaining yet Battle of the Sexes is surprisingly hard work.  It lacks the breezy momentum of Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris’s Little Miss Sunshine (2006) – I’ve not seen the pair’s intervening Ruby Sparks (2012) – and, at two hours, is plenty long enough.  Throughout the sluggish first half of the film, it’s a relief to know what it’s leading up to, even though the eventual on-court battle at the Houston Astrodome is clichéd and a bit anti-climactic.  Dayton and Faris work their way through Simon Beaufoy’s screenplay in a respectful, unimaginative way, as if they were handling a substantial drama.  The dual meaning of their title – referring not only to King (Emma Stone)’s match with Riggs (Steve Carell) but also to the heroine’s psychosexual turmoil – implies that Battle of the Sexes might be just that but its themes don’t translate into exciting cinema.   Larry King (Austin Stowell) and Billie Jean (née Moffitt) were teenage sweethearts.  After several years of marriage, she still loves her husband but the feelings she develops for hairdresser Marilyn Barnett (Andrea Riseborough) prove to Billie Jean that she’s lesbian.  This sexual orientation battle turns out. however, to be no contest.  I’ve never been an admirer of Simon Beaufoy’s writing but, without travestying the facts of the matter, he’d have been hard put to make it otherwise.

Austin Stowell’s male-model-like Larry is pleasant, sensitive and more or less accepting of his wife’s sexuality.  This characterisation is entirely understandable:  as legends at the end of the film confirm, Billie Jean and Larry have remained on good terms; she and her life partner, Ilana Kloss, are godparents to Larry’s children, from his second marriage.  The Kings’ relationship is not, in other words, the stuff of dramatic conflict.  There’s minimal interaction, and virtually no tension, between Larry and Marilyn in the film – little tension between Marilyn and Billie Jean either, except when Marilyn realises she takes second place to sporting competition.  Another difficulty for Dayton, Faris and Beaufoy is that the King-Riggs encounter, though its outcome matters to both competitors and to the tennis status quo, is in part a showbiz distraction from the equality for women players cause that Billie Jean King championed so effectively.   As she accurately puts it to Jack Kramer (Bill Pullman), Executive Director of the recently formed Association of Tennis Professionals and thereby organiser-in-chief of the men’s tennis circuit, ‘Bobby’s a clown’.  And while it’s commendable that the film-makers stick to the historical timeline, this stops them from presenting the King-Riggs ‘Battle of the Sexes’ as a catalyst for change:  television voiceover for the match mentions that women had already received equal prize money at the 1973 US Open, which ended less than two weeks before the Houston Astrodome showdown.  (The achievement of King and others in making that happen is even more remarkable in retrospect:  Wimbledon, the last of the other three Grand Slams to follow suit, didn’t do so until 2007.)

A succession of TV news excerpts conveys the US-centrism of sports coverage in American broadcast media.  The film itself conveys a similar impression – perhaps less intentionally – when, for example, it comes as a bombshell to Bobby Riggs that Margaret Court is about to be named the world number one in women’s tennis.  (By the end of the Grand Slam season of 1972, when the film’s action begins, Court had won twenty-one of her twenty-four Grand Slam singles titles.)  Although it’s suggested that Riggs wanted, from the start, to play King, the combination of her refusal to do so and Court’s official status led to the first ‘Battle of the Sexes’ in May 1973.  In a match that came to be known as the ‘Mother’s Day Massacre‘, Riggs beat Court 6-2 6-1.  (Dayton and Faris give significant screen time to this match.)  The result made it morally impossible for King to resist accepting Riggs’s subsequent challenge.  One of the most interesting snippets of news film archive included in Battle of the Sexes is a contemporary interview with Chris Evert, who had recently played her first Wimbledon singles final and lost to Billie Jean, and who thinks Riggs will beat King.

It’s disappointing that a sporting event as distinctive as the Battle of the Sexes is given such uninspired, in some ways sloppy, treatment.  Billie Jean insists she’ll play Riggs only on condition that she has the authority to approve or veto every element of the match package; there’s no suggestion that any objection is raised to this demand.  How come that on the eve of the match, she learns for the first time that Jack Kramer is to be part of the TV commentary team and threatens to withdraw unless he’s removed?   It’s historically accurate that King entered the arena à la Cleopatra – borne on a featherbed litter by four bare-chested men in slave outfits.  It’s therefore unnecessarily feeble of the film to make it seem that she’s told about this arrangement just as she’s preparing to go on court and mutely accepts it.  The match itself is good only in parts.  Rosie Casals (Natalie Morales), with whom King won so many doubles titles, is part of the commentary team;  shots of the TV anchor with an affectionate arm round Casals, whether she likes it or not, are an unstressed but telling illustration of the balance of power between men and women in 1970s television.  Emma Stone skilfully impersonates Billie Jean’s court movement between rallies (whoever hits the tennis shots is a fine physical mimic too).  She and Steve Carell both do well in expressing the physical and emotional toll the match takes on the players.  But the score updates are very sporadic (there’s oddly more detail on these in the Riggs-Court contest).   And this is, in many respects, a standard-issue climactic screen competition.

Marilyn, who’s been estranged from Billie Jean, makes an unexpected reappearance backstage shortly before the start of the match – but in time to do Billie Jean’s hair.  Bobby’s son Larry (Lewis Pullman) who, rather inexplicably, has been his father’s right-hand man in preparations for the contest, absents himself at the last minute.  Anybody who’s been anybody in the story either turns up at the Astrodome or is shown watching television.  Some of these clichés are confusing, others aren’t even worked through.  It’s virtually implied that the return of Marilyn and the defection of Larry Riggs, respectively raising Billie Jean’s spirits and lowering Bobby’s, may have affected the outcome of the match.  Bobby’s wife Priscilla (Elizabeth Shue), who has thrown him out because of his incorrigible gambling, is courtside for a reason – to pave the way for a later reconciliation with her husband as he slumps disconsolately in the locker room after the match.  But it’s not made clear what other spectators think of the outcome – the homophobic witch Margaret Court (Jessica McNamee), say, watching TV in a hotel room and witnessing her arch rival’s straight sets victory – 6-4 6-3 6-3.  (That the match was best of five sets still seems relevant today.  I support the persisting argument that, to justify the equality of prize money, women’s singles matches in Grand Slams should, like men’s, be best of five sets rather than three.)

Billie Jean King’s manner during her playing career, on court and in interviews, suggested not just that she didn’t care what anyone thought of her or her feminism but that she almost enjoyed getting people’s backs up.  Emma Stone has none of the original’s abrasiveness; she gives Billie Jean a public persona that’s too ready to please.  If Stone were harsher in her exchanges with the chauvinist tennis establishment, the softer moments with Larry and Marilyn, which she plays well, would have greater impact.  Almost needless to say, Stone is also too pretty:  when a TV commentator remarks, with patronising insincerity that Billie Jean, without her glasses, could screen test for Hollywood, he’s only too right.  One of Emma Stone’s best moments comes when Billie Jean sits alone in her dressing room after her Houston triumph:  the image is clichéd but Stone’s strongly-felt weeping suggests an interesting confusion of reasons for the tears.  Steve Carell makes a decent job of Bobby Riggs; he gets over the emotional fragility that underlies, and seems to fuel, Riggs’s chauvinist braggadocio.  This is obvious enough from an early stage, however.  There’s nowhere for Carell to take the character – especially as the film is very sketchy about the attitude towards Bobby of Jack Kramer et al.  There’s barely a hint that they were worried his hustler opportunism might backfire – not much sense either that the powers-that-be of men’s tennis are complacent enough to assume that Riggs is bound to demolish King.  Bill Pullman’s Kramer is edgy and uncomfortable in his first encounter with Billie Jean, smoother but harder to read in what follows.  Fair enough:  the role is uncertainly written.  Sarah Silverman does a busy turn as Gladys Heldman, manager of the Virginia Slims tour in the 1970s.  Alan Cumming is Ted(dy) Tinling, the doyen of tennis fashion design.  Having warned Billie Jean about her affair with Marilyn, Tinling later looks forward to the day when ‘we shall be free to be who we are and to love who we love’.  He’s a surprising mouthpiece for these cautious pieties.  Ted Tinling was openly gay years before it was safe to be so.

28 November 2017