Margaret Court Comes Off As The Villain Of Steve Carell & Emma Stone's New Film

BATTLE OF THE SEXES

For most of the world, Battle Of The Sexes comes as billed: recounting the famous made-for-TV sports spectacle — Billie Jean King vs Bobby Riggs — of the same title. But, for Australian viewers, its 1973 events will seem particularly timely. This is because one of the film’s antagonists is a real-life figure who’s been earning plentiful local publicity of recent: Margaret Court.

Battle Of The Sexes is a two-hander about two sides of a showdown: King (played by Emma Stone), women’s tennis trailblazer and proud women’s-libber; and Riggs (Steve Carell), a former men’s tennis champ who, in his 50s, is but a manic hustler with a gambling problem. Riggs conceives of the cross-gender showdown as veritable get-rich-quick scheme, and plays the wrestling-heel villain for the media, hamming up his Male-Chauvinist-Pig shtick. He poses as King’s foil for publicity, but he’s not; instead, he’s a lovable clown, turning anything he touches into a ridiculous circus.

King ends up facing off with Riggs — and, indeed, with condescending patriarchy — in their climactic match, but that’s not her real battle. Whilst serving as the face of the fledgling WTA and trying to hold down her spot as #1 in the world, she’s also in the middle of an ongoing, secretive same-sex affair. So, Battle Of The Sexes plays not just as a comic sports-movie clad in ’70s wardrobe, but an in-the-closet drama, in which the prospect of blown-cover lingers uneasily.

Which means that there are moments, herein, where King and her love interest (hairdresser Andrea Riseborough) share a covert, loaded glance, and the film cuts away to Court (Jessica McNamee), scowling. This figure of pointed disapproval is a young mother and a “good girl”; whose progressive, powerful lawn-tennis game contrasts with regressive, conservative values. She sits in silent judgment, lectures on “licentiousness, immorality, sin”, and sneers “I’ve got nothing to hide” in our heroine’s direction.

At the preview screening of Battle Of The Sexes that yr old pal Film Carew sat in, these moments were cause for hoots and hollers from the crowd. This was the Margaret we’ve come to know and loathe; the same half-a-century ago as she is, now, in her bigoted dotage. Which means that, for local viewers, there’s a meta-level to the film. Here, a tale about a contrived tennis showdown in early-’70s Texas becomes, unexpectedly, a marriage-equality-debate parable, with the result —an easy win for King, and a symbolic victory over the dinosaurs desperately clinging to their dated status-quo— hopefully echoing the future outcome of our current adventures in democracy-by-postal-service.

This trenchant current of coincidental timeliness adds something to a flick that, otherwise, sails a little too close to crowdpleasing, Oscar-courting mediocrity. The central performances, by Stone and Carell, are great; and directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris delight in evoking ’70s wardrobe, technology, and film visuals. But, they also show their video-clip heritage by foregrounding pop-songs and turning constantly to montage (training sequences ahoy!); echoing a script from Simon Beaufoy that is, far too often, too neat in its story-beats.

The inspirational climax — sexism is defeated! — feels way too rose-coloured, and much of the writing is of a strain of Now We Know Better; in which unrepentant sexism and utterly un-PC proclamations from the past are paraded for our modern-day salacious titillation and/or moral condemnation. Of course, for Australian viewers, these dated claims will be pulling double-duty. Sure, the condescending “little ladies” comments and outright trumpeting of male superiority will be of some distant era, but their spirit is sadly contemporaneous, not far off from what passes for current political debate.

SONG TO SONG

Remember when Terrence Malick was one of cinema’s greatest auteurs? When his films were rare events? Exemplars of cinematic rapture? Glorious shrines to the wonder of cinematography? That feels like long, long ago.

Malick’s recent run —Knight Of Cups, The Voyage Of Time, and, now, Song To Song— is a reminder that the best way to burnish your legacy is to disappear into Salingeresque reclusiveness for two decades, and the easiest way to tarnish it is to keep peddling a run of increasingly-questionable works.

After fashioning a pair of cinematic miracles —the instantly-influential Badlands and Days Of Heaven— at the peak of New American Cinema, Malick went on reclusive, mysterious hiatus in 1978, and didn’t return for two decades.

At first, his comeback was glorious: The Thin Red Line, The New World, and The Tree Of Life were all incredible. To The Wonder was beautiful and restless, in its own way; but, by this point, this immortal auteur was starting to seem like someone tipping close to self-parody. Attractive actresses skipped and pirouetted through sun-dappled fields and across shorelines, handsome actors silently brooded nearby, poetic voice-overs whispered, shots of water babbled away, all the cine-poetry not doing much to fashion something resembling a story.

Where a Malick motion-picture was once a singular cinematic event, they’re no longer that, because they’re no longer made like that. After taking painstaking years for each and every project, Malick has taken to spreading himself thin. Knight Of Cups, The Voyage Of Time, and Song To Song haven’t just come as three films in two years: they were all in production at the same time. This was Terrence Malick not as perfectionist, but dude suddenly operating on Woody Allen’s schedule, and with Woody Allen’s lack of inspiration.

Behind-the-scenes tales of Malick handing cameras to whoever was about and telling them to wander around filming were so amusing because that’s exactly how Knight Of Cups and Song To Song play. They’re essentially the same film, twice over, playing to ever-diminishing returns: sister pictures charting a once-towering figure sinking towards a nadir.

Song To Song is Malick’s valentine to the music scene of his adopted home-town of Austin. Which means: there’s some stuff shot backstage at music-festivals, and Lykke Li and Iggy Pop and Patti Smith appear as themselves, engaging with the film’s fictional world in fleeting moments. Its principle love-triangle are theoretically characters in the music biz: Ryan Gosling is a songwriter, Rooney Mara plays the bass sometimes, Michael Fassbender is a producer or manager or mogul or something; it’s unclear, he’s just wealthy, entitled, someone with power.

Calling the music world a ‘backdrop’ to Song To Song is radically overstating it. Forget the brief glimpses of Neon Indian or Tegan & Sara, the real, literal backdrop is a succession of stately homes, the film more about luxurious real-estate than, like, writing a song, recording an album, or, god forbid, having to suffer the drudgery of going on tour. Here, we hang about in high-rises, lake-houses, sumptuous gardens, and imposing modernist boxes; watching actors stare at each other, surreptitiously checking our watch as they do.

Natalie Portman, Cate Blanchett, and Bérénice Marlohe all blow in as Song To Song goes, as women who can drape their hands in swimming pools or perhaps walk into the ocean. They’re on screen plenty, looking great, but I’m hard-pressed to define a single character trait amongst them other than ‘passing love interest’.

Things happen in the film, but you could never call any of it a story. Of course the film is wafty, poetic, pretentious; this is Malick’s way. Of course Christian Bale, Benicio del Toro, Haley Bennett, and Boyd Halbrook acted in the film but ended up on the cutting-room floor, completely. Of course Val Kilmer, who evidently went to some bonkers method-acted rockstar place, survives for only about two minutes. Of course the whole thing plays like Malick clichés, the great director now just a host of tics ripe for mockery.

But, what sets Song To Song apart is that, for the first time ever, Malick has made a film that looks aggressively awful. Malick’s digital filmmaking era hasn’t just exacerbated his worst tendencies —he can now shoot as much footage as he possibly wants; hand cameras to anyone he feels like; fashion a narrative long after production got underway— but even ruined the simple cinematic pleasures of Malick’s photographic rapture.

I lost count of the amount of times in Song To Song where a shot fell victim to horrifying perspective distortion. Gosling, Mara, and Fassbender are, say, walking down the street, perhaps turning circles. And, as some camera-operator holding a GoPro cavorts amongst them, suddenly the attractive film stars find their heads distending, the image curving like a funhouse mirror. What might be a minor quibble for another filmmaker is, for this filmmaker, a colossal failure.

Song To Song feels like it betrays some silent pact made, long ago, between Malick and his acolytes: his films could be as wafty and as wanky as they pleased, just as long as they still looked amazing. When they no longer look amazing, you’re forced to look more carefully at ­—or, indeed, for— the story. After years of getting by on Magic Hour shoots, here, the Great American Auteur delivers the worst-looking film of his career. And, in turn, the worst film of his career.

FINAL PORTRAIT

If you see Final Portrait billed as a biopic, disregard that genre-stickering. Forget a sprawl over the years, with events unfolding, chronologically, as if Wikipedia entries. Stanley Tucci’s cinematic depiction of Swiss surrealist Alberto Giacometti takes place, instead, over but a few weeks, as the artist sits down to paint the portrait of a visiting American writer. It’s a chamber-piece contained, almost entirely, in the artist’s dilapidated Parisian studio; a two-hander in which there’s little in the way of dramatic weight, but, instead, deep characterisation and off-hand philosophising.

Geoffrey Rush plays Giacometti as bear with a sore head; hair electric, cigarette dangling from his mouth, anger forever bubbling below the surface, ready to boil over (he can only be happy, a character opines herein, “when he’s uncomfortable and miserable”). He’s set opposite Armie Hammer’s impeccably-groomed, entirely-reasonable American dandy; who patiently sits and poses, whilst having to explain his extended absence from New York over the phone to an unseen, unheard, left-behind lover back home.

Tucci —directing his first film since 2007’s Theo van Gogh remake, Blind Date— has written a film full of words, with conversations addressing art-making, portraiture, and the worth of Picasso. But, there are moments of visual flourish, too: a great one-shot of artist and subject, side on, divided by one of Giacometti’s sculptures; a memorable montage where Rush carouses in various brothels in lyrical slow-motion; and macro-lens close-ups roaming over the details of Hammer’s face (pores on nose, stubble on chin, the curve of eyelashes) in a fashion evocative of the artist’s eye.

These moments create resonances with the text, but also help Final Portrait from feeling boxed-in, too stagey. It may be confined, largely, to one location, and have a story that is radically stripped down. But this portrait of a portraitist never feels small or slight; its 90 minutes saying more than most pro-forma biopics ever do.