It was a media spectacle that accumulated importance and became an event—a watershed moment. In 1973, a retired tennis champ, Bobby Riggs, grabbed the media megaphone, shouted aspersions against women athletes (and “women’s lib”) and challenged tennis star Billie Jean King to a match. Male chauvinism tumbled when King trounced Riggs before a television audience of millions.
Drawing from the outline of the King-Riggs match, British screenwriter Simon Beaufoy and American directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris (Little Miss Sunshine) composed Battle of the Sexes. The true story behind the movie is interesting but the movie depends on great acting to keep the ball in play. Emma Stone slips comfortably into her role as King, looking born to wear those big John Denver glasses and that Muppet hairdo. Steve Carell has the tougher part by making Riggs sympathetic, a heartbroken clown going for the brass ring one last time.
Battle of the Sexes is correct to remind us that the King-Riggs bout was seen at the time as a titanic struggle between opposing worldviews. King embodied the feminist ideal of women making it on their own terms in a man’s game—a man’s world. Riggs represented the backlash. King’s victory punctured a lot of windbags and drove women’s sports to greater prominence.
Since the outcome is a matter of record, Battle of the Sexes is a drama mainly for representing the awakening of King’s lesbian sexuality after an erotically charged trim by hairdresser Marilyn Barnett (Andrea Riseborough). Aside from fear of being ostracized, King risks her marriage to a man she apparently loves. Battle of the Sexes is a comedy largely because of Riggs, depicted not merely as a gambling addict but a proponent of calculated risk—an inveterate hustler with a geometrician’s eye for measuring angles. His vociferous male chauvinism is for show. He muscles into the news cycle and prime time by being outrageous and, like some political figures nowadays, he finds a fan base eager to cheer him for even the most shocking assertions.
The movie’s real villains are the overlords of professional tennis, who refuse to pay female athletes commensurate with their male counterparts and embrace Riggs as an opportunity to put down the upstart King.
The screenplay folds complex issues into neat squares, Hollywood fashion. Battle of the Sexes would be left with nothing but feel-good talking points if not for superb performances by Stone and Carell as well as supporting roles ably handled by Sarah Silverman as King’s outspoken advocate, Alan Cumming as her fashion designer friend and Bill Pullman as the smugly condescending boss of tennis.
