Maestro (2023)

Learning How to Conduct Yourself

or

Waiting in the Wings ("Any Questions?")

A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them; and its essential meaning is in the tension between the contradictory answers.

Leonard Bernstein

I have a lot of favorite composers, but the one who always made music that brought tears to my eyes was Leonard Bernstein. There are sections of his score to On the Waterfront that does it, sections of "West Side Story", a recent viewing of Bernstein's "Mass" on PBS "Great Performances" did it to me, even though the thing was going right over my head. And it happened here, in this movie, in the end-credits without an extended segment of his "Candide." 

 

There are moments of great sublimity in Bernstein's music that you wonder that a human being could come up with something like that, tones and phrases so heavenly that they punch you right in the heart. And that he was able to write for theater, film, and the concert house is another of those un-ponderables. Add that he was not only a gifted composer, but also an outstanding student and interpreter of other composers' music, creating some definitive (to my ears, anyway) interpretations. And along with being a great student, he was a great teacher, becoming known for "Young Peoples Concerts" and lectures on "Omnibus". He was a genius, while acknowledging that word is so devalued these days.

But, the thing about geniuses is you never want to work for one. And maybe you don't want to become "involved" with them. Their work, their inspiration is an insular part of that person and sometimes it is a Rubicon you cannot cross. Bernstein was a great teacher, composer, conductor, but was also a celebrity, insatiably curious and had appetites. As Bernstein's sister (played imperiously by Sarah Silverman in the film Maestro) says: "There's a price for being in my brother's orbit..." That price is an isolation, that, although he may be a partner, he will never be a constant one (not that he couldn't be dedicated). He may be loyal, but by giving that loyalty is given permission to be disloyal. Mercurial, temperamental, capricious. Reliable, certainly to his craft and his art, but unreliable in his steadfastness and his exclusivity.

Maestro tells the story of the Bernstein-Montealegre marriage, which lasted 27 years until her death in 1978 (Bernstein died in 1990). And, interspersed with it are individual triumphs—Bernstein's star-making substitution for an ailing Bruno Walter conducting the New York Philharmonic (without any rehearsal) for a CBS Radio broadcast, his work making "On the Town," Montealegre's stage career, his work on the Mahler catalog—and disappointments, the most central of which was Bernstein's philandering with both men and women, as well as Montealegre's eventual death from cancer. It's staged as three acts (naturally), shot in different formats: the early years in academy ratio black and white; the troubled years of success—academy ratio color; Bernstein's life after Montealegre in wide-screen color. Why the marriage years are in the boxy square format and the solo years in wide-screen seems to be making a comment, but I haven't been able to come up with anything that doesn't seem to be in contradiction to the rest of the movie.

The film is centered by the performances of Bradley Cooper as Bernstein and Carey Mulligan as Felicia Montealegure—everybody else in the film are background characters, no matter how well-know (Comden and Green, Jerome Robbins, Aaron Copland), and the film revolves around them, sometimes literally. One's immediate impression is that Mulligan is doing some of her strongest work in years—until you realize that she's always been doing her hardest work. Cooper directed (and co-wrote the screenplay with Josh Singer) and he's given Mulligan and himself some pretty dexterous argument scenes where they're required to talk over each other incessantly and pausing only to spark off something the other person said. There's some deft timing done at high volume and dudgeon that's very impressive.

Cooper's performance is going to be the one that people will have an opinion on—as Bernstein was such a media presence that most people have an instinctive sense-memory about him—the make-up work is quite good with only moments of Cooper managing to emerge through it, and he's given Bernstein three distinctive voices for each section, products of a life-long cigarette habit and a cultivated life-style. I have the benefit of knowing someone who worked with Bernstein later in his life and they give Cooper high marks for his work citing "moments when you'd swear it was him" in postures and hand-work.* I will defer to them for any comments on his work, and will add that their impression of Bernstein—"casual" and "generous"—and that the film was far more honest than was expected.

As far as Cooper's direction, I found it interesting. He is not a great director for the poetic artistic shot, but he is a great director of sequences. After a prologue of the older Bernstein (in wide-screen), breaking down while performing a piano piece in front of the cameras ("So to answer your question, yes, I carry her around with me quite a bit"), the film cuts to black and white box as Bernstein gets his fateful call to conduct in 1943, and Cooper has Bernstein open his drapes, fly out of his room in his shorts and robe, opens a door in the hall and (wham) he opens it onto a balcony in a vast concert hall. The camera zooms out to the stage and a waiting podium, and then back to Bernstein, who turns on a dime and goes back through the door to emerge in a tux and make his grand entrance for the performance. It's very bravura (and all done to the heavy percussive part of Bernstein's On the Waterfront score).

And I began to worry: Is he trying to out-Spielberg Spielberg?** He's not—as the subsequent movie would show—it's just that he likes long "takes." In fact, it's amazing how long a scene will last without cutting away—those "argument" scenes are done in one shot.

Cooper will do a couple of other "showman" sequences during the "early days" sequences, but then he stops. Did he run out of energy? No, it's more a matter of putting the energy into the performances and letting the camera settle down as an uninvolved observer with merely a slow Barry Lyndon-style approach for comment. Those exuberant camera routines merely reflect the heady days of promising youth and endless possibilities...where you think you can do anything. And significantly, as things get more serious, Cooper's camera work gets more placid. Rather clever, that.

Oh, there's a fumble or two. A scene where a clearly cavalier Bernstein drives onto the family estate with his new lover in tow is overlaid with the sneaky opening bars of "West Side Story" and that's a little "on-the-nose." But, for the most part, the choices are good, sometimes surprising in their subtlety, and show a freshman movie-maker still learning some tricks and experimenting and seeing what the possibilities are in this train-set he gets to play with.

The film sets up a mystery with that opening Bernstein quote at the top of the page, and then, at key points, breaks a scene off with a final "Any Questions?" That's not much of a provocation, is dramatically awkward, and I'm not sure the movie fulfills its promise of demonstrating the tension between contradictory answers, so much as showing that any two human beings will have conflicts and must fight their inclination toward selfishness and ego (on both sides) in order to form a more perfect union. But, at least the movie is reaching, and exuberantly so, and Bernstein would appreciate that. He'd have hated a boring bio-pic, even if he had to look bad to get one.

In other words, the movie conducts itself well. Any questions?

* I made a remark that, unlike, say, Joaquin Phoenix in Walk the Line, Cooper's work was more imitation than performance and got the reply "Yeah, well, that's Lenny."

** Spielberg was going to direct Maestro, but an early peak at Cooper's rough cut of A Star is Born made him say "You should direct Maestro."

Ralph Breaks the Internet

Pulling the Ol' Plugola
or
Life Among the Block-Heads

It's surprising how you can not want something until you need it.

For instance, "Lounge Seating." My first experience of it was at an early proponent of it, and the layout was haphazard and piece-meal—a flat floor with a bunch of barcaloungers underneath the screen. I found it uncomfortable and distracting...(or maybe it was because I was watching Baz Luhrmann's version of The Great Gatsby). Not even the new experience of being able to raise my feet —without interfering with the seat of the audience-member in front of me—into a semi-reclining position could dissuade me that this was not a step forward in the movie-going experience. Anyway, it was my first introduction to the trend and I found it lacking. But, then my thinking is that you go to the movies to see movies, not to eat popcorn (how can you eat popcorn when you're scribbling notes?). Ever since, I've curled my lip at the idea of "luxury seating" the way a dog curls its lip when it considers a raccoon.

But, I've now come around the other side of the debate after having watched Ralph Breaks the Internet, Disney's sequel to Wreck-It Ralph. "Lounge Seating" was a god-send, and a salvation. I knew I was in for it, when the super-quad-surround sound of the theater was prominently scrunched to the left side of the hall (to the point where the dialog out of the front speakers could be legible only if you stuck your finger...or a Milk-Dud, raisinet, rolled up Red Vine?...in your left ear) to the point where the dust from the vibrating plaster walls on that side were covering up the "row letters" on the aisle carpet.

There are Pop-Up's, Pop-Up's everywhere...

From what I was able to discern, Ralph and Venellope (voiced, as before, by John C. Reilly and Sarah Silverman) have become inseparable pals when they're not at the day-jobs as video-game characters in the copies of "Fix-It Felix" and "Sugar Crush" inhabiting the video arcade of the "Family Fun Center" of Mr. Litwak (voiced by Ed O'Neill). Ralph couldn't be happier, but Venellope is starting to get tired of the routine, the same-old, same-old of the three tracks that "Sugar Crush" provides—ya know, sort of like watching a lot of Tom Cruise movies (is this the one where he rides a motorcycle?...oh, right, he does that in ALL of them).

Then, disaster strikes. The steering wheel used by players to drive the "Sugar Crush" cars breaks—Ralph is indirectly involved this time—leaving Venellope "gameless." What to do, what to do. Well, as Litwak has installed a wi-fi router into Fun Center, it's only a matter of time before Ralph and Venellope travel to the Land of the Internet to see if they can find a replacement steering-wheel and get things going again. How they get to the Internet is a tortured path-way that made me think that somebody just applied the pop-psych landscapes of Inside Out and just applied it to dial-up.

The opportunities for satire are as seemingly endless as a YouTube conspiracy video, but given permission and copyright issues inherent in using those company names, the satire is as tough as a NERF™-ball. Ebay, YouTube, Amazon are all mentioned, but Google is confined to a character named Mr. KnowsMore (voiced by Alan Tudyk) who does searches around the Internet, like a kiosk lady at a mall—why they didn't just call him "BING™"* would take enough lawyer's briefs to create its own cease and desist order.

Through the search process, Ralph and Venellope find that they can bid on one of these "Sugar Crush" steering-wheels over at Ebay, but when they get there, they find themselves bidding against another user—all the avatars of real-world users are represented by bi-ped's with block-heads, which gives you an idea of how YOU rate in this movie—which they out-bid with a winning sum of $27,001. Their brief joy at getting it is extinguished when they go to check-out, and find that they don't have any of these dollar-things (being as they're just video-game characters who don't get out much) and are told they have to come up with the cash in 24 hours or they will lose the item.

They go about securing the funds in two ways: from one of the annoying pop-up sellers that zap in everywhere—this one named J.P. Spamley (voiced by Bill Hader), Ralph and Venellope learn they can earn money by playing video-games (imagine!), and their assignment for more than enough to claim the steering wheel is finding an easter-egg in the form of the top prize of a GTA video-clone called "Slaughter Race," the car belonging to the character Shank (voiced by Gal Gadot). Their efforts to get the car has unintended consequences—Shank hooks them up with a viral video channel called BuzzTube...and Venellope develops an interest in wanting to be one of the Fast and Furious in "Slaughter Race."

Ralph's appearance on BuzzTube brings him to the attention of Yesss (voiced by Taraji P. Henson) who uses him to increase traffic to the site, while he gets a pay-out for the number of "like's." Venellope helps out by doing her own pop-up selling, which lands her in...wait.

Let's stop there.

Sooooo...the barcaloungers, back to them. Why my obsession with them? It was around this point in the movie where I found myself sliding down my seat as if I was being pummeled into the very naugahyde fabric of it, from my upright position until I was practically prone. Not sure why; it could have been a number of things. Maybe it was that Venellope ends up at the Disney web-site, and I started to feel like I was being sucked into a corporate version of a black hole where mergered properties start to fold in on themselves, creating a sickening disorientation, like a meta-coma (I laughed when I saw the Disney site being called "Oh My Disney™," thinking it might be a satirical jab of "OMG" where "God"="Disney." But, no, the Disney website is—in reality—"Oh My Disney"). When its acquisitions are trotted out—Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, Muppets, but not Fox (too soon for product to be produced, it seems), I sank a little further by the sheer heavy gravity that was being displayed.

And then, a bit of salvation—Venellope meets the Disney princesses™ (and the filmmakers put up the funds for the original voice-artists—the extant ones) and it is as funny and bitchy and irreverent as one would want and the movie gets a nice shot of counter-marketing to off-set the rest of the film's celebration of its own acquisitiveness. The film will, of course, continue on with its life-lessons, its action packed resolution (complete with a creature that seemed like a nightmare out of World War Z) that is the de rigueur denouement of these things, but the highlight of the film is the left-field Princess placement.

And one knows—one just knows—that Disney is thinking of how they can capitalize on it with their own stand-alone movie.

Yeah, spoil it, why doncha?

* As Stephen Colbert once said: "Bing—what you use when you want to 'Google' something."

Wreck-It Ralph

Written at the time of the film's unleashing....

Who Framed Wreck-It Ralph?
or 
Being Two-Bit in an 8-Bit World

It's not that I didn't "like" Wreck-it Ralph.  I did.  I just wasn't moved by it, nor did I care one bit about any of it—not the movie, not the characters—any of it.

Oh, there's a lot to admire: the animation is amazing, albeit to a limited world inside a video game (it can't be too complicated in its design as it's supposed to reflect the limited world-view of a flat 8-bit world refracted in 3-dimensions); the expansions and contractions of those worlds are quite cleverly done—the expansions of those environments being of the commingling of those worlds before the lights turn on in the video arcade, the characters commuting in a Grand Central Station hub to their various scenarios, and the contractions being in the limited animation movements of some of the characters. The voice-acting is fine, headed by John C. Reilly, Sarah Silverman, Jane Lynch, Alan Tudyk, and Jack McBrayer (of "30Rock"). The cameos by various amusement game characters are amusing—the Pac-man ghosts, Sonic, Qbert—which gives the whole thing a tinge of Who Framed Roger Rabbit,* Disney Animation has done a great job of it under the tutelage of Pixar's Jon Lasseter.

But, as great as it is, it's hardly inspired, the central conceit being all those video game characters have lives and concerns when no one's looking, which is the idea behind the "Toy Story" franchise. But, instead of that series forming a concept of the toys banding together to get along in The Big Toy-Box, the issues of the segregated video game characters are decidedly trivial and territorial. They inhabit an 8-bit world, but their concerns are decidedly two-bit, as in the story's central story-line. "Wreck-it Ralph" is the villain of the game "Fix-it Felix"—inspired by "Donkey Kong" but not (Mario, remember?) and he's dissatisfied with his life as a villain. He wants to be a hero, but is never given a chance and his intended role keeps him ostracized in the "Felix" community. He's shunned, gets no respect, and isn't even invited to parties. His "villain support group" provides no comfort. So, Ralph decides to expand his horizons (if video games have horizons) and starts visiting other games, like a WOW game with a butch commander in curvy leather (Lynch, of course), then navigates to another game "Sugar Rush" (no doubt coming to a Game Stop near you) where perky princesses race in a candyland world (and one of the racers is voiced by Silverman, not of course).  

There are some wonderful things that could be done here as far as the migration of traditional characters in non-traditional environments, but what's here doesn't have a lot of imagination as far as plot, the complications or the resolution. Ultimately, it's a bright, pretty snooze-fest (I felt the need to feed myself quarters to keep from nodding off). But ultimately I just wanted to move on, feeling like I was losing a life—the only one I have!—just waiting for the blessed relief of "Game Over."

The game-screen of "Fix-It-Felix" and its inspiration "Donkey Kong"©

* ...although you wonder where some other characters are, like Prince of Persia, Mario, Halo, and then you remember "Oh, yeah, they have their own movie franchises" (mostly inactive) and their places are "suggested" by other characters.

Disney's The Muppets

One for the kids...written at the time of the film's release.


"Of Muppets and Meat-Puppets"
or
"Old Feelings Being Felt"

Back in the 1980's Lord Lew Grade made a ton of green with the syndicated "The Muppet Show," which took Jim Henson's cast of characters and had them stage a show in an abandoned theater every week, with practically every bi-ped celebrity host imaginable, ranging anywhere from Bob Hope to Johnny Cash, with the only possible exception being that of Steve Jobs.

Now it's the 2010's and (as the joke goes) not only do we have no Jobs, but no Cash and no Hope. But, at least we have legs. Pity the poor Muppets; they can't stand straight without somebody's arm supporting them!  Subsequently falling on hard times, with the prospect of their old theater being acquired and demolished for mineral rights by a greedy oil cowboy named Tex Richman (Chris Cooper, once again channeling his inner Shrub), Kermit the Frog (Steve Whitmire) must get the gang together to try and save the theater and protect the very integrity of the name "Muppet."  He has unlikely allies—Gary (SNL's Jason Segel, who co-wrote the hyper-joked, "fourth" wall-exploding screenplay with Nicholas Stoller) and Mary (Amy Adams, who is as goofily inspired in this as she was in Disney's Enchanted), who get mixed up in the plan because of Gary's devotion to his brother Walter (Peter Linz), who was born...a muppet.

Okay, okay, already the movie is straying into terri-story that has some under-pinnings of life-lessons to them.  Plug "muppet" into the "Mad-Libs" space where "developmental challenge" or "specified minority" would go, and you have a nicely anarchic spin to the usual "inspiring" story that...well, a studio like Disney likes to make every now and again. But, Disney always does best when it thinks "outside of the castle" and by re-tooling the Muppets for 21st Century kids* (and their parents who watched them in the 1980's), using Segel and Stoller's less-than-respectful approach to Muppets, mores and movies, a slightly hipper slew of cameos, and the musical supervision of Bret McKenzie (the part of "Flight of the Conchords" that is not Jemaine, and the songs are instantly identifiable as "Conchord" material), it has managed to breath new life into the franchise, while maintaining the integrity of the characters...and Henson's basic art-concepts of marionette-puppetry without resorting to CGI cheating. It's like watching a favorite performer make the artistic jump from vaudeville to a more challenging medium.**

It's easily the best of the Muppet movies, including (uh...) The Muppet Movie which this film makes loving tribute to. I still remember the fascination that first film had for me, being googly-eyed with puppetry at a young age and following Henson's first experimental work in the 1960's and marveling at how he was always pushing the form.*** With Henson's death in 1990 (it's been that long?), and the burgeoning directing career of fellow Muppeteer Frank Oz, the Muppet entity collapsed in on itself somewhat, as those two personalities (and accompanying arms) were the spines that kept the Muppets upright. 

But, this film gives one hope (even if Bob is gone) that the Muppets are in—and on—good hands. This film would be hilarious even without the Muppets, with the scripters and director James Bobin having a fine time playing with the concepts and the whole movie-musical world, and doing so very economically. All it takes is one shot for them to skewer or explain away a movie-magic cliché (a particular favorite—the end of a rousing musical number when the principals leave the screen and the dancers and extras hear "Okay, they're gone" and collapse in an exhausted heap), then move on to the next joke.

Everything works, and there's enough material seen in images and bits of trailers that didn't make it into the movie to assure that only the best stuff made it into the movie, with no "down"-time. It's solidly entertaining, fresh and funny, with surprises around every corner. It's not easy being green, but it's extraordinarily hard to re-boot a franchise when the principals can't even wear boots..and don't have a leg to stand on. The Muppets is highly recommended...for everybody.

You knew something was up, when this rather surprising trailer first appeared.

And only the most churlish could roll their eyes at the way the stars were "revealed."

* It's rated "PG" (so as not to kill a more generalized audience than toddlers, I presume).  But, the only things I thought might warrant the rating was Fozzie Bear's invention of "fart-shoes" to generate cheap laughs, and the mere suggestion that Miss Piggy's "replacement" might be a transvestite (in itself a great joke and another instance of the movie "taking chances").

** And, really, are "The Muppets" any different from The Marx Brothers, The Three Stooges, Abbott and Costello and other vaudevillians?  It's why stage performers worked so seamlessly with them and why they match the "our heroes against the world" formula of such movies.  They also faced the same danger—being pigeon-holed into formula films that ill-suited them.  A Muppet Christmas Carol?  It was only a matter of time before The Muppets Go West!

*** Parents, don't let your kids read this asterisk!  One of the things about The Muppet Movie that I loved was seeing how Henson and crew moved their critters with hidden people attached to them out of the world of medium close-up into full-figured reality without missing a beat, like watching Kermit ride a bicycle (a simple employment of marionette techniques)...or the opening number, which featured Kermit playing a banjo sitting on a log in the middle of a real water-filled lake.  Hey, he's a frog, it's only natural (well, except for playing the banjo).  But, think of it, the puppeteer (actually two of them, one of whom was undoubtedly Henson himself, who "played" Kermit) had to be submerged in a water-tank to pull off that sequence.  It cemented for me the fact that the Muppets and movies were made for each other—both arts depend entirely on what is in the frame and what isn't to pull off the illusion of reality.

Battle of the Sexes (2017)

Bread and Circuses
or
Tennis is a Cruel Mistress

Those of us "of an age" who lived through the "Battle of the Sexes"—the 1973 televised tennis exhibition match between Billy Jean King and Bobby Riggs proved nothing about tennis and the relative ability of men and women to play it—mostly remember the hype and hoopla of it all, rather than its relative merits of any real "battle of the sexes." 

King was 29 years young and at the top of her game. Riggs was 55 years old and at the top of his game in 1939, when he won the Grand Slam. But, Riggs was a gambler and a hustler, and he took advantage of the recent split of nine of the top female tennis players from the USTLA over the pay discrepancy between men and women players to fan the flames of sexism that were inherent in a sport that had its roots in social clubs that had discrimination of sex and religion in its by-laws. It was a calculated gamble. He won publicity either way, and, any overflow benefiting tennis and women's tennis, in particular, was an unintended benefit to those parties.

The "event" was fictionalized before; in 2001, ABC, the network that originally made hay on the televised broadcast commissioned a version "When Billie Beat Bobby" that starred Holly Hunter and Ron Silver (respectively). In the time since, much more has come out about King's personal life at the time and that becomes a major plot-point in Battle of the Sexes, the new version of the story "from the directors of Little Miss Sunshine" (that would be Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton*-it isn't mentioned that they also directed Ruby Sparks, presumably because it wasn't "the indie hit" their previous film was). The result is a fairly straight-forward adaptation (King was a consultant and a remarkably fair one, it turns out) that manages to show the effects of marginalization—whether sex, sexuality, or age (not that we need a demonstration of it these days)—and Society's penchant for exploitation and for waking up and considering larger issues...if there's a buck in it.

At the start—the timeline is crunched, somewhat—Billie Jean King (Emma Stone excellently not depending on her strengths) has won the Grand Slam and is the most well-known women's tennis player on the circuit. She's pulling in crowds. Despite that, tour promoter Jack Kramer (played by Bill Pullman) refuses to raise the stakes of the women's tournament in line with the men's, which, by rights, should be eight times higher than what he's offering. With World Tennis publisher Gladys Heldman (a shining Sarah Silverman), the two decide to create their own tournament, signing on for a token amount of one dollar apiece, attracting enough attention to be sponsored by Virgina Slims. 15-love for the women.

The leading women's tennis players sign on to a tournament for $1 apiece.

Women's tennis is getting attention. The women's tournament is causing controversy. Meanwhile, Bobby Riggs (Steve Carell, who plays it exactly as you'd assume he'd play it, with a sense of the outrageous and the pathetic, making him the perfect person to play Riggs) is unhappily working at a firm owned by his father-in-law, and cheerily using the contacts to make bets on his own skills as a tennis player. Bobby has a gambling addiction—one so bad that he perpetually is playing high-stakes poker with his therapist (now that's funny!)—and he sees the attention the women's tour is getting and he sees dollar signs that go along with his arrogance that he could easily beat any of the women's league. So, he goes on a public attack, challenging King to a grudge match, daring her to take him on. 

She refuses, but changes her mind when Margaret Court, also in the league, accepts the challenge and loses in what became known as "The Mother's Day Massacre." King decides to take him, seeing as how she must now defend women's tennis in the eyes of the ticket-buying public. King is used to being in the public eye, but the intense scrutiny that the Riggs dare focuses on her is something she isn't quite prepared for. And there's another complication—the married King has begun an affair with a hairdresser, Marilyn Barnett (Andrea Riseborough), who travels with the tour. The intense scrutiny of an out-of-wedlock affair, let alone a lesbian affair) could play disastrously in a playing field for hearts and minds.

This part of the story has never been told (and it's the reason Faris and Dayton wanted to make the movie) and sheds a light on the tenor of the times, the stakes at risk, and how easily a capriciously started challenge can turn deadly serious. Barnett's presence is hushed up, hidden, and fairly buried lest it cast an easy-target on women's tennis, women's roles, and feminism, already being given a pretty good beating in the public maelstrom around the event. The interesting thing is that Barnett, and the pressures she was under, are given a very sympathetic eye in the film, despite the fact that Barnett sued King for palimony in 1981, effectively "outing" the tennis star in a very public way. But, the affair is given a romantic edge and there's not a hint of animosity in the way Barnett is portrayed. That is both charitable and practical, because the true focus on the film should be the prejudices across all courts that women faced then and face now.

Mistress and Husband meet cute in an elevator before realizing that they have a loved one in common.

One should mention that the film does a fine job of presenting all these quandaries and challenges without getting more preachy than the evidence already suggests—they stick very close to events as they actually happened, and given the media coverage there is more than enough evidence to vouch for its authenticity. Some of the effects work to achieve it is amazing—they really have an archived Howard Cosell with his arm around the real-life woman playing Rosie Casals? And they do a great job of combining archival footage with match recreations that don't skimp on the dramatics on the court.

It's amazing what causes change, even a bit of one. Riggs, and his outlandish braggadocio, and hustling piggishness put out in relief that women's tennis...and women's careers...was never being played on a level court, but one always slanting uphill. His sideshow chauvinism only brought out in relief the unstated, but very real inequity that was part of the system—it just wasn't highlighted in klieg-lights for all to see. It was kept in the boardroom shadows, without even the grace to feel shame, like an illicit affair might. Grace is what ultimately wins out in Battle of the Sexes, with a victory far more lasting than a number in a records book.

Sports is a distraction—our current Society''s version of the Roman concept of "Bread and Circuses," the means by which the Romans kept the populace from any concentrating on the deficiencies of the elite in charge "through diversion, distraction, or the mere satisfaction of the immediate, shallow requirements of a populace." Keep the masses entertained and they won't notice that things aren't so good as they think. But, every so often, sports will serve as a catalyst for change. We saw it in the desegregation of baseball, the installation of Title IX, and the current "controversy" of "taking a knee" during the National Anthem—as blatant an example of the bread and circuses form of obfuscation. The "Battle of the Sexes," while ultimately being a sideshow, did bring light to the disparity of pay-offs to players of different sexes, and, by reflection, the wage-gap prevalent in the broader work-places. In that way, by shining a light on old prejudices and the status quo, such "distractions" can become genuine "game-changers" sparking advancement and keeping the flame of equality alive...or at least visible in the distance.

* The writer is Simon Beaufoy, who did a few scripts for Danny Boyle (including Slumdog Millionaire and 127 Hours) who produced this—but didn't direct as his sequel to Trainspotting became viable. Beaufoy also wrote The Full Monty, Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, and Salmon Fishing in the Yemen. He may not be a house-hold name, but it's quite a body of work.