'BATTLE OF THE SEXES'........LIBBERS, LOBBERS & LBGTQ

Battle Of The Sexes (2017)   We wanted so much to fall in love with this movie......

          Sorry. Best we could do was....."ehhhhh......okay."

          Reason? The filmmakers overreached and jam-packed the movie with multiple issues, multiple agendas.......an avalanche of sexual/political/cultural angst.

          Add to that the lack of the film's ability to maximize the power of its scenes.......and you have a dramatically slack movie that also can't get out of its own way........

           The 1973 circus-act tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs clearly meant different things to its two combatants.....

           For King, it was dead serious, a storming of the Winter Palace, an overthrow of the myths of male superiority and condescension towards women.  For Bobby Riggs, it was a grandly humorous stunt to turn his newly minted fifteen minutes of fame into an eternity......King wanted empowerment for herself and her fellow female athletes......Riggs just craved attention.

          So we surely can't fault screenwriter Simon Beaufoy for making the film Billie Jean King's story, with Riggs' desperate efforts to keep himself in the spotlight used as poignant comedy relief.

           Problem is, we grew weary and impatient as this movie presided over a massive collision between every issue that straddles 70's and 00's........piling on women's pay inequality, gender discrimination, gay discrimination........and if that wasn't enough, the awakening of Billie Jean's lesbian sexuality.....

            You could have easily chopped this movie up into four or five separate films.....

             We admire the script's cleverness in making the much of the dialogue (especially the clashes between King and men's tennis Honcho Jack Kramer) sound like it could easily be lifted out of 1973 and applied to the same conversations we hold today.

              But that cleverness (".....aha, sounds so familiar!") also worked to jar us out of the story. All that not-so-subtle, up-to-the-minute editorializing only served to distance us from the real drama of Billie Jean King's internal and physical struggles........with so many issues to serve up, the film sometimes seemed to stop just to admire itself.

             And the co-directors, Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, really don't have the chops to organize their scenes to grab an audience by the lapels and shake 'em up. They're strictly Independent film festival skimmers, deftly gliding over the material without ever digging too deeply.  (They completely sabotage the King/Riggs tennis match, filming almost entirely in long shots...)

             Brilliant casting, though.......which saves the movie. Without Emma Stone and Steve Carell, we might not have made it all the way through it.......

              So we'll lob 2 stars across the net (**) for this battle.......and those stars are entirely for Stone and Carell.........two trophy-winning performances in a movies that lobs too many balls in the air at the same time.