It seems a strange question to ask, but films that take on any sort of serious sporting theme are getting rarer and rarer. It’s not as though sports have gone out of fashion. TV audiences, sponsorships and attendances around the world are at an all-time high, but at the same time the movie industry – and its Siamese twin the games industry – seems to have fallen out of love with sports.
Now this strikes us as… well striking. If you look at the history of film, sports plots abound – Raging Bull (boxing) springs to mind as a classic, Rush and Senna (motor racing) stack up impressively, and there are others that we could point to as worthy of merit as well, but rather than list them, it is perhaps equally worth pointing out that for every decent treatment, there are hundreds of duds. Some of them so bad that they enjoy a kind of cult status all of their own – Tin Cup (golf) and Blades of Glory (ice skating) and 2006’s should-have-been-instantly-forgotten Benchwarmers (baseball) have to be endured to be believed.
With the world-renowned Cheltenham festival 2015 just around the corner films that feature horse racing are hard to ignore. Seabiscuit was notable for its saccharine sweet play on the emotions, just as National Velvet once did back in the days when Elizabeth Taylor was just a kid.
In fact, that overly sentimental treatment may point to one of the reasons why sports films so seldom cut it. Sporting drama is not the same thing as narrative drama. Get the mix wrong and all you get left with is an emotional mush. In a word, sports plots tend to hammer out the personal, emotional component of a piece as some sort of grand metaphor. It might work for horses, but it just doesn’t quite work when it comes to engaging with a human character. Conversely, the competitive drama that is intended to be part of the piece can only ever be a replica. It’s a second hand appeal to audience appetites. Whichever way you cut it any film that puts too much emphasis on the sport is on to a loser.
Where films like Ron Howard’s Rush score, is in weaving the competitive and the personal into a coherent relationship in which the human aspect – the defining aspects of character and plot – are to the fore. In Rush, the racing is brilliantly represented, but the significance of the racing is drawn from the relationship between the protagonists – it is not an end in itself.
We’ve already mentioned the symbiotic relationship between the games industry and the movies, and that, inevitably, has a bearing on the films that are being made currently. In a nutshell, it makes good business sense to CGI a few impressive, highly marketable fictional characters onto a screen, the rake back from a sports franchise is far harder to get a hold of.
At the same time the base-line competitive drama is a lot more visceral if it is a matter of life and death rather than who gets to win the money to save the family farm. Modern box offices tend to reward films that appeal to fairly unsophisticated tastes.
That is not to say that there are not some sports-themed offerings that offer more depth and more serious-minded dramatic potential. Mickey Rourke’s Golden Globe winning performance in The Wrestler, for example, shows what can be achieved against a sporting backdrop, and the presence of Mohammed Ali in the headlines currently is a reminder of what is possible in terms of documentary genres. ‘When We Were Kings’ will always be a classic. But like the film’s main subject, they just don’t make them like that any more.