I saw the Battle of the Sexes on TV back in 1973, as 29 year-old Women’s Tennis Champion Billie Jean King played 55 year-old Bobby Riggs. Back then I wasn’t so much a tennis fan, more a boxing fan mostly because of my Dad. The Battle of the Sexes was certainly not Ali versus Frazier in The Thrilla in Manila. Billie Jean smoked Bobby’s ass in straight sets. I remember Billie Jean as strong and pretty. I thought Bobby was a joke and a jerk. That was history from at least my perspective.
History and perception make Directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris’s 2017 “Battle of the Sexes” great and somewhat hollow. Writer Simon Beaufoy’s screenplay is best when it focuses on the “battle” within the sex as Billie Jean reconciles her own sexuality and risks being in love. Emma Stone as Billie Jean King is sublime and so very human. Awesome performance. On the other end of the narrative spectrum, Bobby Riggs was a con man, really the joke and the jerk. As much as Steven Carell authentically inhabits Bobby with verve and arrogance, he’s locked in. Beaufoy paints Riggs as pathetic, and we just can’t empathize with the jerk. Poignant Elizabeth Shue as his rich suffering wife does little to reveal his lighter humanity.
Dayton, Faris, and Beaufoy vilify others too. Bill Pullman plays the legendary tennis great Jack Kramer with insidious charm and snark. Unlike Bobby, who plays the WWE role like Hulk Hogan, Kramer’s discourse about women is sadly sincere. Kramer truly believes that men are better than women, not only as athletes, but as people. I don’t know if this is an accurate representation of history. Women Tennis Champion Margaret Court, tightly wound Jessica McNamee, is the unsympathetic homophobe—even before this was a distinction.
It is the human story of Billie Jean that touches in “Battle of the Sexes”. Alan Cummings is amazing as the gay wardrobe designer Ted Tinling on the WTA Tennis Tour, who is aware of Billie Jean’s awakening. The married Billie Jean (Stone) embarks on an affair with hairstylist Marilyn Barnett, radiant Andrea Riseborough. Simply, Marilyn may have been the first kind person to acknowledge Billie Jean as “pretty”. In the heartbreaking scene, her husband Larry, played by handsome vulnerable Austin Stowell, discovers the betrayal. Larry is the decent good man. Cummings’s Ted cautions Stone’s Billie Jean, “Be careful. The world can be unforgiving.”
Seeking equal pay, Billie Jean and her promoter Gladys Heldman, wonderfully strong Sarah Silverman, choose to leave Jack Kramer’s Lawn Tennis Association (LTA) to form the WTA and the eventual Virginia Slims Tour, legitimizing Women’s Tennis. However, WTA’s reputation is threatened when retired Tennis Hall of Famer Riggs defeats Margaret Court in an exhibition match.
Aware of the ‘big picture’, Billie Jean asks Larry to set up the tennis match with Bobby, but on her terms. She also has her own match raging within. In their heart touching conversation, she says, “You’re a good man. He says, “You’re a good woman.” She replies, “Not always ”
There is a wonderful scene as Billie Jean and Marilyn drive along the Malibu coast. They listen to Elton John and Bernie Taupin’s “Rocket Man”. Fortunately “Rocket Man” doesn’t have the same connotation it has today. In Bernie’s lyric: “I’m not the man they think I am ” We should all have the freedom to be ourselves. That is the underlying message of “Battle of the Sexes”.
The actual tennis match in “Battle of the Sexes” is no big deal. It is the impact of the social consciousness of the times that resonates. Cummings’s Ted gently hugs Billie Jean after her victory, and says, “One day we will be free to be who we are”. That touched my heart. Perhaps, one day. It’s possible.
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Originally Published on IMDb
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