Butler's Cinema Scene

Steve Carell, Emma Stone

“THE BATTLE OF THE SEXES”  My rating: B+

121 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

Those going to “The Battle of the Sexes” expecting 0nly a bit of lightweight nostalgia had best gird their loins. There’s more going on here than a re-creation of a oddball moment in our cultural history.

Yes, this retelling of the famous 1973 tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs has its share of humor and historic earmarks. (Those costumes. Those hairstyles.)

But you’ll leave Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris’ film (they were the pair behind “Little Miss Sunshine”) struck by how relevant its issues remain, by the anger percolating just beneath the surface, and for its implicit warning that  the bad old days may be making a comeback.

Simon Beaufort’s script wastes little time in setting up the basic conflict.  In 1970 nine of the best female tennis players rebelled against the U.S. Lawn Tennis Association over the disparity between prize money awarded men and women.

Outraged, the reigning women’s champion, Billie Jean King (Emma Stone), and tennis journalist Gladys Heldman (Sarah Silverman) corner USLTA head Jack Kramer (Bill Pullman) in his exclusive men’s club.

Told they cannot be there, Heldman shoots back: “Why? Because I’m a woman? Or because I’m Jewish?”

Right there “Battle of the Sexes” draws its line.  Progress versus the reactionary status quo.

The upshot is the creation of the all-women Virginia Slims tennis circuit.

In a parallel plot line we eavesdrop on former tennis champ Billy Riggs (Steve Carell), now immersed in post-career boredom.

Riggs fritters away his days at a make-work job at his father-in-law’s business; at night he hangs with his drinking buddies, taking bets that he can beat anyone at tennis while tethered to two large dogs  or substituting a frying pan for his raquet.

His high-society wife (Elisabeth Shue) makes him attend Gamblers Anonymous meetings, which he breaks up by declaring that the problem isn’t that these people gamble, but that they’re bad gamblers. Winners don’t need support groups.

Andrea Riseborough

Sniffing possibilities in the shifting social landscape — and always looking to revive his fading public profile — Riggs concocts the idea of a match between himself and the woman’s champion, a tennis battle pitting (in his words)  a male chauvinist pig against a hairy-legged feminist.

Riggs is the most colorful character on the screen — hell, he was the most colorful character in any room — and Carell effectively mines his obnoxiousness, madcap creativity and desperate yearning for continued adulation.

Next to him Billie Jean King is practically a  cipher, a woman whose personality only really comes through on the court. She’s a reluctant feminist, forced to take a stand by circumstance. She’d be happy just to play the game and canoodle with her supportive surfer-boy-handsome husband Larry (Austin Stowell).

It’s a testament to Stone’s skill that “Battle of the Sexes” transcends Bobby Riggs’ buffoonish showmanship to become  the story of one woman’s growing awareness.  King’s evolution is propelled not just by tennis and shifts in society at large, but in an unexpected romance.

King — who apparently had never experienced sex with anyone but her husband — finds herself being gently pursued by Marilyn (Andrea Riseborough), a hairdresser tending to the women on the Virginia Slims circuit. This affair is simultaneously thrilling and terrifying. Especially if word of it were to leak to the press.

Not that “Battle…” is a coming out story.  King returned to her husband and wouldn’t declare herself gay  until several years later.

The eventual showdown between King, 29, and Riggs, 55, is presented as the conversation-dominating goliath it actually was.  The hoopla surrounding the event is often hugely amusing (for instance, Riggs posing nude in a photo shoot aping Burt Reynolds’ notorious Ms. magazine centerfold). Even though we know who won, the match generates terrific tension.

But it’s the social landscape “Battle of the Sexes” explores that really matters. The condescending male privilege exhibited here may seem quaintly outdated…until you step out of the theater and realize things may not have changed so much after all.

| Robert W. Butler