Race

Dur­ing the 1936 Berlin Olympics, an African-Amer­i­can man named Jesse Owens won four gold medals, much to the cha­grin of the Nazis sat in the stalls. With his film Race, direc­tor Stephen Hop­kins wants us to believe that the uni­fy­ing pow­er of sport can over­come the divi­sive­ness of pol­i­tics, and so he places all sub­tle­ty to the side to force this sen­ti­men­tal notion down our throats. What Owens did was nat­u­ral­ly spec­tac­u­lar. Drum rolls and con­fet­ti are not required.

Hop­kins cap­tures Owens’ will of steel by plung­ing us into his pre-game mind­set: before the race, his coach tells him to dis­re­gard the crowd and con­cen­trate on his inner self. The adren­a­line spikes and, in a way, it feels a bit like watch­ing an actu­al sport­ing event on TV. The film’s pro­duc­tion design is suit­ably luxe. Some­times, how­ev­er, it’s hard not to feel that we’re being talked down to. The seeds of Nazism are vis­i­ble when an Inter­na­tion­al Olympic Com­mit­tee rep­re­sen­ta­tive arrives in Berlin to assess the situation

The sub­se­quent dri­ving mon­tage plays like a his­to­ry les­son. The line between good and evil is also too sim­plis­tic, most­ly when it comes to the sup­port­ing roles: Carice van Houten as Leni Riefen­stahl and Jere­my Irons as the IOC rep­re­sen­ta­tive deliv­er inter­est­ing turns that blur their rela­tion­ships with the Nazi régime. Gen­er­al­ly speak­ing, the cast is exem­plary. Stephan James as Owens is entire­ly con­vinc­ing as an elite ath­lete, but his por­tray­al is lim­it­ed by the poor qual­i­ty of the dialogue.

Plot-wise, the film plays out like a word-for-word ren­der­ing of Owens’ Wikipedia entry, even if the polit­i­cal con­text of the time is pre­sent­ed in a bal­anced and affect­ing man­ner. The hor­rors of racial seg­re­ga­tion in Ger­many are laid bare, but we are also shown how things are not so dif­fer­ent back home. Yet it’s all too smooth to firm­ly res­onate with frac­tious racial issues in con­tem­po­rary America.