WATCH NOW
At the start of “Borg vs. McEnroe,” a brief look back at the two legendary tennis players‘ rivalry highlights one of the most remembered events their face-off during the 1980 Wimbledon championship. This battle, along with the rivalry itself, shaped the future of tennis as well as impacted the players themselves.
This is certainly one of the more unsatisfying aspects of the film, which is frustrating because it constantly chooses to tell instead of showing. This is the conclusion one should be able to arrive at without too much effort and artistic stretch. That does not seem the case for Danish documentarian Janus Metz, who is making his first feature on a script by Ronnie Sandahl. He seems to be very intent on simplifying the lives of these two tennis legends and holding our hand through it all.
When Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe met, both players had a skill set that could easily be viewed as the complete opposite of each other. However, on that eminent summer day for the men’s final, McEnroe would come to realize that Borg, the cool and disciplined Swede with laser-like groundstrokes was very much all about precision. The American hothead was known for being profane and troubling his opponents with a combination of serving and volleying. On top of that, he scared his opponents by sprinting towards the net. Borg had been on the chase of his fifth victory, breaking his record of four. McEnroe was the highly skilled newcomer, thought to be the only one who would actually beat him.
Wait for it this is where you scratch your head wondering, “How can two athletes who seem to be outliers be so similar?” Shotgunning the premise of “Borg vs McEnroe” reconstructs its central characters as characters stripped down to the barebones version of themselves, packing meaningless childhood memories through unending looped head-scratching dreams.
It’s frustrating because LaBeouf’s portrayal has a powerful performance like Gudnason’s, but the story does not focus on McEnroe as much as it does on Borg. Although both players’ names are in the title, Gudnason is the clear expert here, and LaBeouf is sadly cast as a supporting character and not the main one. Gudnason has the eerie trait of looking like the tennis superstar and heartthrob that he’s supposed to be. He has a quite compelling subtle intensity within him. His catatonic persona, as we see him in the coach’s presence who risked training him, played by Stellan Skarsgard, is the result of constant instruction to control the emotion that he shows. It’s an elaborate plan made to demolish the notion of emotions ever being uttered. It is just as much of a strategy and practice as his organized training sessions. (Tuva Novotny who played one of the fearless scientists in Annihilation earlier this year and did so fantastically, doesn’t get to do a lot else except for serving and smoking and being Borg’s devoted fiancée).
McEnroe on the other hand is all about chasing impulses and cannot hide any of his feelings or thoughts.
And LaBeouf is stunning as he extends his run of portraying difficult, dangerous characters which began with Lars Von Trier’s Nymphomaniac films and American Honey. But a part of the unquestionable seductive factor of watching him portray such a well-known temperamental character has to do with the comparisons that are bound to be made to the actor’s own well-known volatility. He looks like he is revelling in those similarities. Perhaps straddling the line between performance and real life is liberating. (He clearly has a proclivity for this type of self-referential exploration, if you examine his recent performance art endeavors) The approach he took while trying to become McEnroe is, no matter how he felt about it, incredibly captivating, and certainly the most captivating thing in the film.
Perhaps the greatest crime of all is how Metz depicts the final battle in tennis. It was epic, spanning five sets with an incredibly brutal tiebreaker lasting over thirty minutes. The crowd, which is typically well-mannered, was extremely supportive of Borg and booed the obnoxious McEnroe. Many people expected history to be made by Borg and yet the crowd booed McEnroe. But Metz shoots and cuts it (using editors Per K. Kirkegaard and Per Sandholt) into staccatos and flashes a hand here, a foot there, a racket served, a serve thrown, flashbacks that linger somewhere in the middle of a titanic clash. And again, the announcers that are narrating the game keep repeating and repeating how much Borg and McEnroe differ, this time in multiple languages.
After the entire process of draining the body is done. Both Borg and McEnroe meet each other for the first time at an airport right before they are set to fly home. The two make eye contact and begin to approach each other, albeit slowly. They start talking to each other for what seems like the first time in their lives. Just like the last scene where the two are together, the atmosphere in the room before this scene is filled with tension. Metz then makes the mistake of separating us too far from the scene. He allows us to witness the two without providing any context to their conversation.
This might have been the most intriguing part of the movie, but it is bafflingly presented out of place. I believe no two individuals understand each other better than these two do.
To watch more movies like Borg vs. McEnroe (2017) visit 123Movies.
Also Watch for more movies like:
