Have You Thought About Squash Instead?

Rating: 5/10 (8 November 2016)

When I was a child the favorite American sport was baseball. Interest in football was limited to college teams because there were no professional teams. Over the years football seems to have eclipsed baseball as the national sport. And the reason is easy to understand. Baseball has a lot of slack time. The pitcher has to survey the field, the batter has to get in position, sometimes he lets the ball sail by, and there's very little physical contact.
Compared to football it's dull. Football has a cabal of behemoths bashing one another. The only pause in the action occurs when the teams run together for a huddle. Now we have basketball, which is all action all the time. Movies have pretty much followed the same trajectory. If a good film like "Bullett" had a thrilling high-speed pursuit, similar films now begin and end with a car chase. And they usually end with exploding fireballs. The snub-nosed .38 has been replaced by an ugly black cannon that fires bullets the size of footballs and has the added advantage of never having to be aimed or reloaded.
Okay, okay. I'm stepping down off this egg crate. Someone give me a hand, please? Thank you.
I wanted this to be really good and, in fact, the performances aren't at all bad, especially Will Smith in a dramatic role, and an almost unrecognizable Albert Brooks. The doc who represents the NFL is memorable too. And most impressive are Eddy Marsan as the unapproachable expert in the field of brain damage, and Peter Berg, who looks like you look when you get out of bed after a night on the town.
Berg is the first cadaver who shows up on pathologist Smith's table. Smith has never heard of football so he knows nothing about it. Yet here's a football hero who played for almost 20 years for the Pittsburgh Steelers and has been acting crazy for a year before snuffing himself. His brain looks normal, except when it's "fixed" an sliced up into paper-thin pieces for microscopic examination. Smith finds something unusual. What it is, isn't clearly explained. ("Bad proteins.") But he concludes it's the result of getting your head banged around on the gridiron for twenty years and he calls it "concussive traumatic encephalopathy." I don't believe the symptoms f the victims shown on screen. There's not just dementia but every single victim turns extremely violent. Makes for a tumultuous scene each time but it's probably fabricated.
Against the advice of many of his colleagues, afraid to alienate the all-powerful National Football League, he published his findings on two similar cadavers, both football players. I envied him when he opened his copy of the (unnamed) medical journal and glowed with pride when he saw his name at the top of the list of coauthors. I remember the warm glow I felt when I first saw my name as a coauthor in a scientific journal. There were only two other names, Frances Cheek and Richard Weisman. Medical journals tend to have far more coauthors. Smith's original article, for which he was largely responsible, had about half a dozen. Some have had as many as sixty-five, which to me sounds like overreach.
Well, that's a bit off track, I know. But the story itself is familiar to anyone who has watched the biopics that came out of Warners and MGM during the 30s and 40s. Of course this has a much larger budget and is in color on a wide screen, yet the armature is there. An unexpected discovery by a scientist. It's controversial. There are supportive but skeptical friends. There's an identifiable enemy, who caves at the end. At the climax, the now-gray-haired but thoroughly redeemed hero gives a conciliatory and inspiring speech to a quietly eager audience of scientific aristos. You can check the framework out in something like Edward G. Robinson's "Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet" or Paul Muni's "The Story of Louis Pasteur." "Concussion" may be as well done, although despite the uplifting ending nothing in football seems to have changed. Makeup has done a good job on Smith an on Albert Brooks. Not on Alex Baldwin, who looks wrecked.