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reviews "When Billie Beat Bobby" Famous tennis "battle of the Sexes" between Bobby Riggs & Billie Jean King |
 Ron Silver as Bobby Riggs, checking out the muscles of Holly Hunter as Billie Jean King ("When Billie Beat Bobby" premieres Monday, April 16, 8-10 p.m., on ABC stations.) |
Absurd as it was, the real match
was a lot more fun than this movie
By
RON MILLER
of TheColumnists.com
THOUGH it's true that I really got into the so-called tennis "Battle of the Sexes" between Bobby Riggs and Billie Jean King back in 1973, I wish I could say the same for the dumb movie that ABC has made out of it more than a quarter century later.
The least we should expect is that we might get some real insight into the two central characters after all this time, but that's the core failing of writer-director Jane Anderson's script: It gives us a sort of newspaper morgue file rendition of Riggs and King with only an occasional attempt to do more.
For those too young to have been there or too old to remember, the tennis match between 29-year-old King, then arguably the best female tennis player in the world, and 55-year-old former men's champ Riggs was popularly believed to be some kind of genuine litmus test for the coming of age of women's sports in the era of the women's liberation movement.
It was, of course, nothing of the kind. Women's sports was going to come of age anyhow, but Riggs, the perennial tennis hustler, saw a chance to return to the national spotlight and make himself a huge bundle of money by playing the role of chauvinist pig so blatantly that millions of women would put up good money to see him get his butt kicked by a woman on national television.
So, ironically, the match did become socially important after all, but only because it served as a means for millions of American men and women to act out their resentment of each other over their attitudes toward the struggle by women for true equality with men.
The movie certainly shows this by underscoring Riggs' efforts to bloat this crazy notion into a megabucks event, finally drawing outspoken feminist King into his scheme because she was cast in the role of womankind's Great Redeemer by the press--and finally began to believe it herself.
What's missing is any real understanding of why Riggs was the way he was. Ron Silver plays him as a sort of cartoon character--flabby, near-sighted, hard of hearing and sort of drunk on himself. I'd like to know why this man craved the spotlight so much that he was willing to make a public spectacle of himself. I'd also like to know if he ever seriously thought he was going to whip King and, if he did, what it did to his ego when she cleaned his clock in one of the most-watched TV events of its day.
I also wished they'd given us some substantive conversations between King and her husband and friends about the issues. There are no well-constructed dramatic sequences where any of the characters reveal themselves through dialogue. Instead, the approach is whimsical and goofy and most definitely once-over-lightly.
Holly Hunter is one of my favorite performers, but I also was bothered by her as King. She looks as if she trained up for the part, but she's too small, too scrawny and spare to suggest the real Billie Jean, who was a robust, well-conditioned athlete in those days and somehow dwarfed Riggs when they started to play, making it pretty obvious whose butt was going to be kicked that day.
I'm guessing that Anderson, Hunter and her co-producers (one of them was Goldie Hawn) had in mind something like Hunter's wonderful 1993 HBO movie "The Postively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom," which also was written by Anderson and successfully mined the humor in a true story that became a pop culture phemonenon. Anderson fumbles the script this time--and the earlier film also had the fabulous Michael Ritchie as director, whose touch with such material is hard to beat.
Another disastrous weakness in "When Billie Beat Bobby" is the miscasting of Fred Willard as Howard Cosell, whose pompous commentary on the ABC telecast made us feel as if we were watching Ali vs. Frazier's "Thrilla in Manila" instead of a rather pedestrian tennis match between a top female player and an over-the-hill male player whose greatest moments of glory came around 1939. Willard was so great as the dog show commentator in last year's movie "Best of Show" that somebody must have thought he could do the immortal Cosell, too. As Lefty Frizzell might have said, "Look what thoughts can do."
But there are some nice moments among the crevasses. One of them comes when Billie does a commercial for a hair-curling device, cashing in on the hoopla. To say she looks uncomfortable is putting it mildly. I'm not certain Billie ever had a good hair day--and Hunter's "do" for the movie underscores that fact. That said, I should point out that Hunter's "Billie" do is infinitely more attractive than Silver's "do," which makes Riggs look like a geriatric Beatle who accidentally washed his hair with paint thinner.
The film also does a pretty good job of reminding us how crass the whole thing finally got when Riggs teamed up with boxing promoter Jerry Perenchio to hype the match and started lining up grotesque commercial jobs for the two stars. Posing with a giant "Sugar Daddy" candy sucker, Riggs moves beyond ludicrous. And did he really suggest Billie Jean might want to take that giant candy stick home and suck on it? Let's hope not.
Where the movie really lets us down, though, are in the scenes that seem to be trying to get inside the heads of the two characters. We see Billie in some awful dream sequences, but the low point comes when the movie suggests King finally decided to accept Riggs' challenge after seeing an airline flight attendant turn over a month's salary to her flight captain after betting it all on tennis champ Margaret Court, who was defeated by Riggs in a preliminary to the big money match. King seems especially troubled by the fact that the captain also gives the stew's ass a little squeeze after taking her money.
Somehow I can't believe Billie Jean King really decided to tackle Riggs because she wanted to come to the defense of exploited women. I'm guessing Riggs made her see major dollar signs and that she recognized what all the hoopla could do for her drawing power in the world of real tennis. I suspect her altruistic notions came later.
King cooperated with the film and gave interviews that went into the script. Riggs is long gone, so his material comes from published accounts in the press. Had he still been around, though, I'm sure he would have cooperated--and probably would have demanded to play himself.
In retrospect, the real Riggs-King match proved nothing about the ability of female players to handle male players in evenly matched events. What it did prove was how gullible all of us are out in TV land. If this rather useless movie is a ratings winner, it will be further proof of the same phenomenon.
© 2001 by Ron Miller. The photo is courtesy of ABC.
You can comment on this column or contact Ron Miller with an email to: talkback@thecolumnists.com
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