Peter Landesman (2015)

In 2005, a Nigerian-American neuropathologist called Bennet Omalu, with colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh, published in the journal Neurosurgery a paper entitled ‘Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy [CTE] in a National Football League Player’ and called for further research into the disease.  Concussion, written and directed by Peter Landesman (Parkland, Kill the Messenger), is the story of how Omalu took on the might of the NFL and its vested interests to establish a link between American football and CTE.   The film’s opening scene takes place in a court of law.  Omalu is in the witness box, about to give expert evidence.  He is asked first to state his medical qualifications and reels off a list of degrees that’s meant to be almost comically lengthy.  Though the staging is clumsy, Will Smith as Omalu conveys an engaging eccentricity which survives into the immediately following sequences.  These show Omalu at work, talking affably to the dead bodies on which he’s doing autopsies. As soon as things start to get serious, however, Bennet Omalu’s individuality leaks away.  He becomes a-man-with-a-mission and Will Smith turns uninterestingly dignified.  (It’s possible that Smith felt he was on a mission too – to land at least a nomination for an Academy Award.)

In response to criticisms of the film’s portrayal of one of the NFL players diagnosed with CTE, Peter Landesman has insisted that Concussion is ‘emotionally and spiritually accurate all the way through’.  One of the few moments that actually merits this description comes when Julian Bailes (Alec Baldwin), former team doctor to the Pittsburgh Steelers, is sufficiently exasperated by Omalu’s preachments to call him a ‘self-righteous son of a bitch’.  Otherwise, the picture is almost bereft of believable detail, in small things and large.  Omalu literally keeps making a point – his forefinger only centimetres away from the face of the person on the receiving end.  But no one ever tells him to stop the impassioned finger-jabbing:  it’s essential to the movie that exchanges like these are unmediated by the reality of human interaction. The main function of the other characters, regardless of the supposed animosity between them and Omalu, is to accept his irresistible arguments and help move the narrative on towards the hero’s vindication.  When his wife Prema (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) loses the baby she’s expecting as a result of the trauma of being stalked by NFL frighteners, she sheds a few tears before composedly reassuring her husband that they will have a family.  A few screen minutes earlier, we’d watched Omalu, while Prema slept, speaking quietly to their unborn child; there’s no follow-up to this in his upset at the miscarriage – even though there’s a horrible resonance with the earlier chattering away to corpses.  A couple of screen minutes later, the Omalus have one infant child and Prema is heavily pregnant with the next one.

In this idealised marriage, Gugu Mbatha-Raw has little to do as Prema but keep reminding her husband how noble he is.  (She needn’t have bothered.  Will Smith seems already too aware of the fact.)  The film could have made something out of Bennet Omalu’s being (a) deeply religious and (b) uninterested in watching American football:  in the circumstances of his profession and his crusade, both of these are distinctive qualities.  Instead, his Christian faith is treated as a part of Omalu’s developing-world-origins delightfulness (the fervent desire to become a US citizen is another part of Peter Landesman’s patronising attitude towards his protagonist).  There are a couple of references to the profound cultural importance of the NFL, including a suggestion that, as a Sunday fixture, it’s displaced the church in many American lives but Landesman doesn’t bother to suggest what Bennet Omalu might have felt about that order of hebdomadal priorities.

When material of this kind is turned into poor drama, it’s tempting to suggest (as Geoffrey Macnab in his Independent review of Concussion did suggest) that it should have been done as a documentary instead.  The standard response to this argument is that a based-on-actual-events mainstream movie with a big star in it will do much more than a documentary could to raise public awareness of important subject matter.   Landesman, although he may have been driven by a desire to bring Bennet Omalu to the attention of a mass audience, has carried out the job without imagination or even confidence in the story he’s telling.  Concussion purports to be a celebration of scientific research but it’s made by people who are clearly nervous about blinding-slash-boring with science so the detail of Omalu’s discoveries is strictly rationed.  Just about all we get is a succession of images of CT scans, and of shots of Omalu and others peering into microscopes and stepping back to register astonishment at what they’ve seen.  These are feeble clichés but the commercial thinking behind them is sound enough:  the film’s box-office takings now comfortably exceed its $35m budget.   Peter Landesman’s deference to the one-good-man-against-the-system movie formula is such that Concussion is eventually confusing, though.  When Omalu gives a climactic speech to an NFL conference on concussion, the respectful reactions of his audience express sheepish recognition that he was right all along, and indicate acceptance by the powers-that-be of his research findings and their implications.  But the sequence seems to have been included only because the public vindication scene is a standard requirement of this kind of moral drama.  The legends on the screen ahead of the closing credits suggest that the NFL engaged in a more protracted battle to keep in the dark what Omalu strove to bring to light.

The cast also includes Albert Brooks, as Omalu’s supportive, principled boss, and Luke Wilson, as Roger Goodell, who takes over as NFL Commissioner at the height of Omalu’s campaign.  (Goodell remains in charge of the NFL today, ten years on.)  Among the various medics, Eddie Marsan, in a cameo appearance, brings a welcome jolt of individuality to proceedings.   Among the ex-players, David Morse registers particularly strongly as Mike Webster, the Pittsburgh Steelers center whose autopsy was the starting point of Bennet Omalu’s discoveries.  James Newton Howard’s score might be said to serve Peter Landesman’s purposes perfectly.  It’s relentlessly obvious.

15 February 2016