Battle of the Sexes (2017)
Directed by Valerie Faris, Jonathan Dayton
Written by Simon Beaufoy
Starring Steve Carell, Emma Stone, Andrea Riseborough, Sarah Silverman, Bill Pullman, Alan Cumming
Release Date September 22nd, 2017
I’ve spent a few days wrestling with why I don’t love the new, true life drama Battle of the Sexes from two of my favorite directors, Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton. The directors of the wonderful Little Miss Sunshine and the sublime Ruby Sparks have delivered a solid effort in Battle of the Sexes, but there is just something lacking. It’s not the performances either, as both Emma Stone and Steve Carell deliver standout takes on real life counterparts Billy Jean King and Bobby Riggs. So just what’s wrong with Battle of the Sexes?
Battle of the Sexes tells the story of the 1972 tennis match-up that pitted women’s liberation, in the form of female tennis champion Billy Jean King, versus the self-proclaimed champion of male chauvinism, Bobby Riggs, himself a former tennis champion from some years earlier. King had recently left the American Lawn Tennis Association to help launch the new Women’s Tennis Association after a fallout over equal pay with ALTA’s leadership, headed up by Howard Kramer (Bill Pullman).
It was a huge moment for women’s tennis as King and her manager, Gladys Heldman (Sarah Silverman) risked everything to take the world’s top female tennis stars out onto their own tour with the goal of proving they could earn just as much money as male tennis champions. It was an even bigger moment for King as the new tour also found her in a new relationship, as she began to find her sexuality for the first time by falling in love with a hairdresser named Marylin Barnett (Andrea Riseborough). All the while she’s married to her devoted husband Larry (Austin Stowall) and could lose everything if people found out about her affair.
Complicating Billy Jean’s life further is Riggs, who challenged King early in 1972, just after the launch of the WTA and after she ignored his pleas, challenged fellow women’s champion Margaret Court just as Court was coming off a recent upset win over Billy Jean. Court would go on to lose to Riggs and force Billy Jean to be the one to challenge Riggs in order to save face for women’s tennis and their potential earning power.
As you can tell from that description, there is a pretty terrific and dramatic story in Battle of the Sexes. So why doesn’t it work? Much of the problem comes from Academy Award-winning screenwriter Simon Beaufoy’s script, which fails to parse the parody-level male chauvinism with the actual sexism that Billy Jean King was up against. Beaufoy’s script renders Bobby Riggs as a lovable conman who used chauvinism as a way of marketing and not the cruel dismissal of women tennis players it actually was.
Find my full length review in the Geeks Community on Vocal
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