The beautiful game
I’ve been watching Euro 2008 all week and no movies. As the knockout phase starts, there will actually be days without football, and I can start squeezing films in again. In the meantime, I thought it might be interesting to offer a few words on the subject of football in the movies, and why there aren’t any good movies about football, because football is really popular, right, and movies are really popular, so why can’t a combination of the two put the boffo in box office?
Of course, I haven’t seen many of these movies about football (because I’m really interested in movies and not football, with the exceptions of major tournaments or big games), although I might have seen Escape to Victory (1981) in a moment of weakness when I was younger, but who can say? Sylvester Stallone is the goalkeeper, apparently, and it must have been all downhill from there. I haven’t seen either the most recent attempt at box office gold, Goal! (2005), though according to the imdb, for a $10 million budget, it pretty much made that sum back, which doesn’t make that movie a big hit. And I haven’t seen Zidane (2006), a total football documentary that follows Zinedine Zadine over the course of one game with multiple cameras, but in the cinema this was basically relegated to an arthouse release.
The audience for cinema and the audience for football are two different audiences, and it is hopeless to try and accommodate one audience because in doing so you will only alienate the other. One recent football film I have seen is Bend It Like Beckham (2002), though the football sequences were shot as quickfire editing montages, sometimes using an open shutter a la the opening beach combat scenes in Saving Private Ryan (1998). This successfully obscured an accurate assessment of the footballing talents of the actresses involved.
But as an attempt to show the game of football, I think quickfire editing is deadly, especially when so much of what is great about football is long passes through space allowing a player to break and pass to allow another player to score, or a defender to stop them. Football is oddly uncinematic and awfully difficult to film well, and breaking it down into short bursts does it no favours (because you can assume that what’s being obscured is the twenty takes when the actor didn’t pass the ball properly), but neither does allowing it to flow uninterrupted (as I’m assuming moments in Zidane were allowed to flow) because then it stops being cinema and starts becoming television (and who wants to go to the movies and watch television?).
What must be terribly annoying about football for film directors is that, as every football fan knows, there are moments (if not endless 20 minute periods) in which nothing much happens except the ball being knocked around the park. This can be a compelling midfield battle, or it can be timewasting dullness of the first order; either way, how can you film that and make it interesting? Much better to concentrate on the goals like all those endless montages that fill up football coverage before the game starts. We know what football looks like because we see so much of it on television, and as soon as you start to interfere with that by running slow motion replays and swishing things around on screen to make it more visually interesting, you end up missing the corner, because one of the teams has taken it quickly (something which Euro 2008 TV directors have been doing at least once every match). To break with that and turn football into over-edited cinema ends up denying what makes football great. Football happens in real time, and for the most part real time is something that cinema doesn’t do very well at all.
I don’t know how good a footballer Sean Bean is, but in When Saturday Comes (1996), I’d like to bet that a good deal of his part on the football field was created through editing. What Bend It Like Beckham (2002) got right though was that a sports movie really has to be about something else if it’s going to succeed at the box office and achieve the more long term goal of becoming a film that is valued after its time in theatres has gone and the passing of time has allowed a film to continue to be valued or not.
Although there are apparently fewer words designed to cause a movie executive to choke on their coffee more than “it’s set in the world of minor league baseball,” Bull Durham (1988) has become that kind of revered classic (I love it to bits, and it’s one of those movies I can turn to when I’m feeling a bit down and in need of cheering up). Although Bull Durham is set in the world of baseball, it’s really about any number of way more interesting, character-based themes such as aging, maturity, adulthood, childishness and so on, along with generous helpings of warm sexuality and goofball humour.
The good sports movie is a field in which writer/director Ron Shelton has succeeded because he understands the sports he makes movies about because he’s played the sports in the real world and knows that the machismo that fires a sportsman up is even more compelling (and/or ridiculous) when contrasted with the no-nonsense femininity of his romantic partner. I could be wrong, but I don’t think a professional footballer has ever directed a movie (and thank heavens for small mercies). The Americans have got the sports movie down much more successfully than we have in the UK because they understand that a sports movie has to be about more than just sports. Here we make Footballer’s Wives (2002) and it’s all a bit of a disaster area because it turns out that you can’t out-tabloid the bizarre reality of tabloid football coverage.
Is there a football movie that has achieved that classic status? I don’t think there is.
June 15th, 2008 at 2:55 pm
Odd isn’t it? There aren’t football equivalents of ‘The Natural’, ‘Bull Durham’ or ‘Field of Dreams’, we’ve not even turned out decent biopics on the level of ‘Pride of The Yankees’ or ‘Babe’; ‘Best’ was, I thought, a poor dramatisation of the apocryphal ‘where did it all go wrong?’ story. That’s not to say we can’t do sport pictures in the UK - ‘Champion’ and ‘Chariots of Fire’ leap to mind, but if the best we can do for the beautiful game is ‘Goal!’ (several notches below ‘The Arsenal Stadium Mystery’ in realism) then we’re in trouble.
Boys own mags used to be full of sports based strips (anyone remember ‘Wilson’ or ‘Alf Tupper’?), it’s quite odd that we can’t translate that stuff to film - perhaps it’s something in the British psyche, that we don’t really mind coming second?
Much the above applies to cricket films (which you would think baseball movies would provide a parallel narrative path for) , but perhaps it’s quite telling that the most famous, Asquith’s ‘The Final Test’, ends with our hero getting out first ball. How very English.
June 15th, 2008 at 3:58 pm
There certainly isn’t, though I’d like to imagine the film adaptation of David Peace’s novel ‘The Damned United’ might change all that, just as the book turned out to be the exception to the rule about there being no good football fiction.
As someone who has struggled through football-based novels in the past, I wonder if the problem for movies, just like books, is that it’s almost impossible to match the emotion of the real thing. Real life football has plenty of drama, and hundreds of stories, just from one season’s action, so what can the movies provide to top that? Taking, as one terrible example, ‘When Saturday Comes’ - the story is so hackneyed that it puts the film at a disadvantage from the start. Throw in some poor acting performances and a lazy lack of tension and you have one sorry mess of a movie. ‘Escape to Victory’ only has a little more popular appeal because it mixes football with ‘The Great Escape’ but no one is ever going to kid themselves they’re watching a classic.