Movie Review: “Unmatched”

To celebrate three decades on the air, ESPN commissioned thirty documentaries to be made chronicling the sports stories which have captivated people’s imaginations during this time.

For the most part, 30-for-30 focused on the big American sports, however, one exception that slipped through the cracks was Unmatched, a look at the remarkable rivalry between tennis legends Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova, directed by award-winning film-makers Lisa Lax and Nancy Winters.

John McEnroe and Jimmy Connors played 34 times, as did Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi; Current foes, Federer and Nadal have faced off 25 times. All impressive tallies, until compared to Chris Evert’s and Martina Navratilova’s unprecedented 80 separate encounters. Between the two, they account for 36 Grand Slams and a combined 592 weeks at the top of the WTA rankings.

Without question, this is the most prolific rivalry in all of sports, and yet, Lax and Winters decided to highlight their off-court friendship as the backbone of the feature.

While fully appreciating that the desire not to making “another typical sports documentary” draws film-makers to look for different angles to approach such projects, I cannot help but feel that in this film, the fact that they are women over-shadows their remarkable accomplishments as athletes.

Granted, the friendship angle is an interesting one; the notion that the only person who can ever truly understand you is the one person who’s going through it with you, and yet, never at the same time. When one wins, the other loses, and so on and so forth.

However, during the clearly directed conversations between the two, there is less a sense of shared experience being revisited than there is an over-riding feeling that perhaps they never truly knew each other that intimately. When Evert suggests that she had talked with Navratilova regarding her sexuality before it was made public, Martina seems confused and surprised. While there was clearly a friendship, it becomes evident throughout the film that this friendship was perhaps more a bi-product of their parallel lifestyles than a true affinity with each other.

The lack of actual footage and the use of text to express their sporting feats becomes almost distracting in its utilization. While you can understand the direction the film-makers wanted to go, it increasingly feels as though they were going out of their way to completely ignore the sporting element. To that point, the soundtrack is closer to an episode of Dawson’s Creek than it is to a sports movie.

Unmatched gives less a sense of titans engaging in epic bouts of athleticism, and more a sense of two high school friends reuniting for a girls weekend at the beach.

I’m more than certain that had the two protagonists been men, this film would have an entirely different feel. There has been much written about the close friendship of Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal, and yet, it is inconceivable that a film depicting their great rivalry would place their friendship above their epic battles.

No, this emotion-driven movie, filmed as a conversation between two middle-aged women on a couch, and even in the kitchen, feels like step backwards for equality in sports. The only way this could have been more obvious is if one was actually cooking in the kitchen or if the two were chatting while walking through the supermarket.

It felt as though more time was spent talking about dates than their matches, which, when you consider how little of the movie addressed the fact that Martina was a lesbian, becomes another interesting feature in itself. While Evert’s marriages are addressed, the only romantic encounter mentioned on Navratilova’s part was a date with a guy. While this was an interesting story where the two women’s path certain crossed, it feels like an unnatural direction for the film to take in order to appease the traditional audience the film seems to be seeking.

While it is obvious that the primary plan not to make a typical sports film has driven the project, it occurs to me that had they made a more typical sports film, it would have been more cutting edge by virtue of simply featuring women.

Just as any feature on Ether Vergeer cannot be completed without focusing on her disability above her unprecedented domination, it feels that features on female athletes have to go beyond the fact they are athletes and address the fact they are first and foremost women. Often, as is the case with Maria Sharapova, Danica Patrick, and several others, that they are attractive first, and athletes second. People watch the smash hit series Mad Men and marvel at the degrading treatment women endured in the 1960″²s, and yet, movies like this still manage to discredit any feat a woman may achieve in the sporting arena, replacing it with a soft-furnished chat about dates with boys.

All too often, non-traditional sports stories featuring women, children, or disabled athletes fail to focus on the impressive athleticism, thus undermining the entire point.

The perfect example where the opposite is true is Murderball, the documentary addressing the rivalry between the US and Canadian Wheelchair Rugby teams. While these guys were unmistakably disabled, the film focused largely on them as athletes, which provided a far fresher and unique look than would have been done had the film focused on the non-traditional-sports angle of their inflictions.

Ironically, when the stars of Murderball went on Larry King Live, the interview centered entirely on their disability, and the entire point was once again missed.

Despite all this, it’s still a pretty good movie. It has a few great stories which I was otherwise unaware, such as the touching story Martina’s emotional return to Czechoslovakia for the Fed Cup match. Equally, the piece was produced with excellent aplomb, as you would expect from such noteworthy directors.

However, I feel that had Unmatched, which is just under an hour in length, been expended to highlight just what incredible athletes they were and gave due credit to the incredible achievements these women made, not only individually, but for the sport and for women’s sports in general, this film could have been exponentially better.


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