'Battle of the Sexes' is a reminder of how far we've come – and how far we haven't
At one point in Battle of the Sexes, a character pretty succinctly sums up the movie, and the 1973 tennis match that inspired it: "It's another battle in the never-ending war of the sexes."
That is, as dramatic as the event was, it was just one colorful point in a long fight for equal rights that's still going on today. It didn't start anything and it didn't finish anything -- but it did mean something to the people involved in it, and to the times surrounding them.
In 1972, Billie Jean King (Emma Stone) is at the very top of her sport. Fans adore her, commentators admire her, and even the president of the United States takes the time to put in a call to the most successful female player of all time.
None of that is enough to earn women's tennis the respect it deserves. Male reporters chuckle that "there’s no stopping this little lady." The national tennis association refuses to give equal prize money to the men's and women's tournaments, despite the fact that they've sold the same number of tickets. Men are "faster, stronger, more competitive," the organization head (Jack) explains "It’s not your fault. It's just biology."
Meanwhile, former male champion Bobby Riggs (Steve Carell) is feeling adrift. He has a job he doesn't care for, and a gambling habit that continually disappoints his wife. When he sinks to a low point, he hits upon the idea of a male vs. female tennis match to make some money (and regain some of his former glory in the process).
Bobby's the kind of guy who becomes the center of attention of any room he's in, and Carell seems to have fun playing him. If the performance occasionally verges on cartoonish, well, it's honestly hard to tell if that's Carell's fault or Bobby's. Stone's role is more restrained, but it's also meatier, and she pulls it off with strength and grace.
The supporting performances surrounding them are more of a mixed bag. Sarah Silverman is tremendous fun as Gladys, manager of Billie and her fellow female players, whereas Fred Armisen sticks out like a sore thumb as Bobby's quack doctor. (Armisen keeps getting cast in these glorified-cameo roles, and it's almost always a bad idea; he sucks the oxygen out of any scene he's in.)
Directors Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton, and writer Simon Beaufoy, don't add a whole lot of bells and whistles to the Battle of the Sexes story – it's more or less a straightforward telling of two overlapping narratives, Bobby's and Billie's, culminating in their faceoff on the court.
Sometimes, this works to their disadvantage. I'd have liked a bit more development in the romance between Billie and her hairdresser, Marilyn (Andrea Riseborough, intriguing), particularly once Billie's husband (Austin Stowell, quietly heartbreaking) finds out and the situation gets more complicated.
But Battle of the Sexes is so shrewd in other areas that it's hard to complain. What Battle of the Sexes understands is that this match looked entirely different depending on which side you were rooting for. For the men, it was just a show. Sure, a defeat would be disappointing, but no one really stood to lose anything from the match. Men's tennis would stay where it was, no matter the outcome.
For the women, on the other hand, the stakes were high. Women's tennis had something to prove, and if Billie couldn't prove it, it had the potential to undo much of the Billie's fight for equality. So Billie trains and practices and stresses about what she stands to lose, while Bobby spends the lead-up to the match hamming it up for the cameras and posing nude for magazines.
That dynamic – well-prepared woman vs. clownish man – is one that'll feel all too familiar today, four decades later. So are the obvious and subtle ways that the men in this film try to dominate the woman in it – the way a tall male commentator puts his hand on the shoulder of a female commentator, for example, as if she were a little girl doing something cute instead of a professional woman doing her job.
As the game heats up, and Bobby starts to realize this won't be an easy victory, he loses the clownish showboating, takes off the jacket with his sponsor's logo, and starts to actually work for the win. The male announcer seems disappointed that Bobby's apparently lost his sense of fun. "It's become a very, very serious thing," he complains.
But that comment is only true for the men. For the women, it's always been a very, very serious thing. It still is.
