Losing battle

I hope someday someone will make the movie that the trailer for Battle of the Sexes, the PG-13 sports biography starring Emma Stone and Steve Carell as Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs, promises.

Based on the trailer, we expect an in-depth look at how the consummate showman Riggs engineered a 1973 tennis match with King that started as a media circus but became a serious milestone in the women’s liberation movement. If the movie offered a little insight into whether Riggs—a perennial hustler and compulsive gambler—actually threw the game as has long been rumored, so much the better.

But the actual Battle of the Sexes isn’t terribly interested in this story, despite how relevant Riggs’ talent for turning hammy, half-serious political incorrectness into applause has suddenly become. Instead it quickly sketches out the bad guys and good guys with zero nuance so it has time to fully trace King’s adulterous romance off the court. Bad: Tennis promoter Jack Kramer, who won’t pay female players the same as the men, and King’s rival Margaret Court, who quotes the Bible and hates gays. Good: King’s luminous lesbian lover Marilyn and, of course, King herself.

The movie spends so much time lauding King’s burgeoning relationship with Marilyn, it never stops to question whether viewers will actually agree that her behavior is laudable.

Consider if a young, heterosexual male character had the same narrative arc. If he met a beautiful young woman and, despite being married, decided on a whim to take her on the road with him. If he barely made any effort to hide the affair from his colleagues. If, once discovered, he assumed an air of belligerent entitlement, almost parading his relationship in front of his faithful, long-supportive spouse. Is this a character audiences would likely find sympathetic?

So why do the filmmakers think we will find such behavior appealing in King, particularly as she shows almost no guilt over violating her vows? Simply because the person she was cheating with happened to be of the same sex? I suppose so, seeing as even King’s husband seems happy enough to take his wife’s cheating on the chin for the cause of enlightenment.

Notably, the movie leaves out some significant information about the affair in its historical update placards at the end. Like the fact that King and Marilyn went on to have a very public, acrimonious breakup that led Marilyn to a suicide attempt and left her a paraplegic. That kind of information would have been far too weighty and real for this modern fairy tale of progress. Stone gives a fine performance, but had the film dealt more honestly with King’s obvious selfishness and how it helped her dominate her sport, she would have been a far more compelling character.

In the midst of all this personal drama, the main attraction gets the short shrift. Carell does a tremendous job bringing Riggs to life, but we get only the broadest strokes of what drove him. The even bigger loss, however, is how little the film works to put this strange cultural moment, complete with jackets blaring “Sugar Daddy” and piglets squealing on the court, into historical context.

As we know, King wins, confetti drops, and women nationwide cheer. But there’s no triumph in the milestone because the movie has already made clear that this victory and what it symbolically represented to America at the time isn’t the point. This is 2017 and we have other hay to make out of the showdown at the Houston Astrodome.

Steps from where King’s husband is celebrating with the crowd, her stylist pulls her aside not to congratulate her on her win, but to play the role of literal gay whisperer, crooning, “Someday we will be free to be who we are and love who we love.”

When a Christian movie telegraphs its message as blaringly and gracelessly as this, mainstream critics rightfully roll their eyes. I don’t expect they will in this case, but they should.