Luke
stu-kicks
CibbuanoThis Sporting Life
February 25th 2010 06:07
From the opening scenes of unfettered aggression on the football field it becomes patently clear that this isn't your typical 1960s drama. This Sporting Life is a dense and brutally honest examination of the male character as refracted through the prism of a successful sporting career. Sports movies are, by and large, usually about a facet of the sport in question that bears examining. Here, the sport featured (rugby league), is incidental and microcosm to a wider question of masculinity. The title of the film itself is an elegant and understated joke at the expense of previous modes of filmmaking... director Lindsay Anderson dissects the protagonist's life with an unwavering sense of objectivity, washing away many decades of film conventions in regards to audience sympathy and the previously established unwritten laws of dramatic narrative. Footy player Frank Machin's less-than-perfect life is laid bare without irony or gloss, at the time raising a new bar for realism in English-speaking film, and as a result it remains a timeless and un-dated work of art.
Frank Machin (Richard Harris, in a towering performance) is a complicated man. He had ambitions to make it as a professional football player and seems to court attention, but it's also clear that he derives little joy from from either of these things. He rents a room with a widow, Margaret (Rachel Roberts), and has designs on bringing her out of her sorrow and back to life as his lover, but she is largely unreceptive to his attempts to become the new man of the house. As Frank undergoes extensive dental surgery after a particularly violent collision on the football field (one that leaves his front teeth smashed out), he remembers his induction into the game and the rise to fame and modest fortune that followed. We cast an unjudgemental eye over his sporting life as we're shown all that went into it and all that comes out of it.
Central to this film is an unflinching and uncompromising look at who Frank is and what makes him the way he is. Frank is your typical alpha-male sportsman and every major part of the film (direction, writing, performance) casts him in the full dimensions of a real person - something that cannot be grasped in a few minutes. Instead it takes a whole movie for the audience to get a proper handle on Frank, and even then it's pretty clear that we can only know him as much as we've been shown. I'm not sure I've ever seen so complex and realistic a characterisation on the screen... the insecurities and flaws of a football player aren't really something that tend to get examined in this level of artistic detail. The pride, the brutishness, the alpha male behaviour that makes some men equal parts rivals and comrades, the rise of Frank's ego and cockiness, his own hollow envy, the way he brags about his fame and makes his fellow players uncomfortable, that semi-blank look of animalistic indifference that I've seen on so many men's faces around 1 AM at a leagues club before they snap into a self-destructive fit of violence... it's a sobering and unexpectedly authentic look at working class masculinity and male emotional impotence that pre-figures Raging Bull by nearly 20 years.
This Sporting Life is also so much more than just this. You simply can't talk about this kind of thing in a British setting without involving the class system, and there are many allusions to professional sport operating as an extension of the upper class playing officers-and-soldiers with the working class. It's an uneasy relationship that always threatens to bubble to the surface, and is never more uncomfortably apparent than in the scenes that demonstrate the antagonistic attitude portrayed by the working class towards money and materialism. More than one reference is made to Frank and the other players being performing monkeys, and the scene where Frank takes Margaret to a posh restaurant begats the kind of ugly behaviour made famous by Joe Pesci in Goodfellas ("How am I funny?"), though perhaps it's even more awkward here due to the context being more indentifiable.
You also can't talk seriously about a tough, manly sport like rugby league without acknowledging the latent homoeroticism that it goes hand in hand with. The more obvious examples of this are the naked wrestling in the bathhouse, the character of 'Dad' Johnson (William Hartnell, brilliant as an old closeted welsh homosexual), or the scene where Weaver (one of the club owners) puts his hand on Frank's knee to symbolise their professional partnership. Less obvious, but perhaps more insightful, is the scene where Frank cuts in on a dance purely as a means to get a man to fight with him. This intertwining of male interaction and mutable sexuality isn't exactly at the forefront of the film but - like life - it's there, and it's a fascinating added dimension to an already fascinating film. It's also surprising for something that was made in 1963, and it makes the film seem more modern than most of Hollywood's output in the forty-odd years since.
Richard Harris was deservedly nominated for a Best Actor Academy Award for his portrayal of Frank Machin, though he lost out to Sidney Poitier. Fortunately Harris still managed to make a career for himself off the back of his work here, and it's worth noting that the actor's sense of ego and insecurity amongst his peers often led to difficulties on the set of his more mainstream films for many years afterwards. These character traits no doubt helped make his performance in This Sporting Life such an authentic tour de force... you simply can't fake that kind of toughness. It also takes a brave actor to portray an imperfect and unsympathetic character like Frank so honestly, it's something that a lot of modern famous actors still won't really do. Rachel Roberts is also to be commended for her role as the character of Margaret - a miserly, miserable thing twisted by the tragic death of her husband. She does well not to let the character descend into a two-dimensional caricature of grief gone rotten, and the point where Margaret and Frank begin to, er, 'interact' as 'lovers', could have become a distracting source of controversy had it been handled by a less talented actress.
This Sporting Life has been hailed as one of the groundbreaking films that ushered in the British genre of 'kitchen-sink drama'... I'm not really a fan of that phrase as (to me) it seems to denote a banality or routine-ness that's inherent in real life, and I think This Sporting Life is a lot more exciting that that. It's a bleak movie, and it won't be to everyone's taste, but it's a very rewarding experience and it stands out amongst it's contemporaries like a strong ale in a case full of mixed women's drinks.
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