Battle of the Sexes (4/5 Stars)

Putting the Show back in Chauvinism

The show was so good it is hard to believe that it was actually true. “The Battle of the Sexes,” a tennis match played in 1973 between Bobby Riggs and Billie Jean King plays like a professional wrestling match. In one corner is the heel, the ex-champion Bobby Riggs, a boastful, clownish, male chauvinist. In the other corner is Billie Jean King, young, serious, the greatest female tennis player in the country. Bobby believes that he can beat at his age, 55, any woman who has the guts to challenge him. His reasoning: men are better than women. The match became so hyped that it ultimately was played in a football stadium and 50 million people watched it on television. Like professional wrestling, it had a man one could love to hate and a woman everyone wanted to win.

Except that this wasn’t a professional wrestling match. The outcome that would delight the world, good guys win, bad guys lose, was not predetermined. The prize money was a million dollars and Bobby Riggs, a compulsive gambler, had bet $15,000 of his own money on himself. There would be no throwing of the fight and the fact that Bobby had previously soundly beat the next best female tennis player, Margaret Court, in what was termed the Mother’s Day massacre, had put a real suspense onto the outcome of the match. The match was exciting. And in this movie, the feeling is fully captured.

To Billie Jean King, the significance of the match was very serious. She had turned down Bobby several times before Margaret’s defeat, made it essential that she take the match in order to prove that women’s tennis wasn’t a joke. At the time, she was lobbying for equal pay in tournaments between men and women. Her reasoning: the men and women sell the same amount of tickets, why are they paid differently. To Bobby, the significance of the match seems less serious and more of a ploy to be paid more money. Bobby knows that by trolling the women’s lib movement he could generate interest in the match. Whether he actually hates women is an open question, but on a certain level it doesn’t matter. He does not take the women’s lib movement serious. As he comments in one scene: the women don’t deserve to be paid as much as the men because they can’t beat the men in a match-up. In fact, he says, “I’m being paid less to play on the men’s senior circuit than the women are making in their regular circuit. If I can beat the top women, its unfair to me to be paid less than them.”

It strikes me that I’m talking far more about the plot than usual. Well, that speaks to the power of the story. It is a fantastic battle between two very strong characters. Steve Carell is the perfect actor to portray the clownish Bobby Riggs and Emma Stone is perfect as Billie Jean King. In fact, I think this is the fullest character Emma Stone has ever played and is her best performance. Sarah Silverman and Bill Pullman pull their weight in supporting roles.

The movie thankfully pays a lot of time and attention to the match itself. It is well directed by Jonathon Dayton and Valerie Davis (directors of “Little Miss Sunshine”) and written by Simon Beaufoy (“Slumdog Millionaire”). This is a good movie. I really liked it.