Borg Vs McEnroe

On the rare occa­sions that the BBC is able to broad­cast sport­ing events, they usu­al­ly do so in lav­ish style. Their pre-game cov­er­age will usu­al­ly include some extend­ed and overblown VT sequence which jux­ta­pos­es the ensu­ing sport­ing event with the Siege of Troy or Stal­in­grad. Borg Vs McEn­roe is the the fea­ture ver­sion of that VT sequence, as anoth­er vaunt­ed chap­ter of mod­ern sport­ing his­to­ry is fil­tered into a pas­si­ble pres­tige biopic with heroes, vil­lains and the weight of expec­ta­tion that comes from being an elite athlete.

In 2010, the Dan­ish direc­tor Janus Metz was respon­si­ble for a blis­ter­ing doc­u­men­tary called Armadil­lo, about the dai­ly oper­a­tions at a mil­i­tary base in Hel­mand province, Afghanistan, dur­ing the con­flict. The Metz from that film – cool, col­lect­ed, unsen­ti­men­tal – is all but untrace­able in Borg Vs McEn­roe, a glossy chron­i­cle of the sup­posed court rival­ry between Swedish man-machine Björn Borg (Sver­rir Gud­na­son), and bub­ble-permed fire­brand, John McEn­roe (Shia LaBeouf).

The film’s dra­ma ends up bank­ing on the fact that the view­er doesn’t know how the final of the 1980 Wim­ble­don Cham­pi­onships turns out, and whether Borg was able to win his fifth con­sec­u­tive title and become one his country’s most icon­ic sports­man. Which is a slop­py gam­ble all told.

As the silent, brood­ing type, Borg is very much the main focal point, with McEn­roe the charis­mat­ic antag­o­nist who rails against the ​“gentleman’s game” of ten­nis by abus­ing umpires and toy­ing with his oppo­nents. As a nip­per, Borg was a mani­ac too, going total­ly bananas when a ball is called out and smash­ing his rack­et on the ground.

But then the man who put faith in him as a future star, Lennart Bergelin (Stel­lan Skars­gård), advis­es this prodi­gy to show no emo­tion, bot­tle up every­thing and build a rep­u­ta­tion as the paragon of pre­ci­sion-tooled calm. It tran­spires that vac­u­um-sealed sup­pres­sion only works for so long, and Borg starts to feel the heat when McEn­roe tees him­self up for a place in the final and, even­tu­al­ly, a match for the annals.

The script, by Ron­nie San­dahl, builds up a sim­plis­tic psy­cholo­gies by con­stant­ly trac­ing back the roots of trau­ma to child­hood. It means the film set­tles into a rote sys­tem of show­ing the title char­ac­ters doing some­thing osten­si­bly bad or aggres­sive, and then let­ting them off the hook because of some ran­dom episode in the past. The cli­mac­tic match is whipped up with over-the-top music cues and mean­ing­ful flash­backs to sim­pler times. The film neglects the fact that the thing that’s dra­mat­ic about ten­nis is the tennis.

Instead, we get a stan­dard-issue clash of egos which has been manip­u­lat­ed and man­gled for the sake of a movie nar­ra­tive. The leads pre­tend to play ten­nis well, and LaBeouf does a nice, salty imper­son­ation. But there’s not much more to it than that.