Battle of the Sexes

As a palate cleanser for 2017, you could do much worse than Battle of the Sexes, a lightweight but likable sports movie in which a male chauvinist tennis player takes a drubbing from a fitter, stronger, more talented and determined athlete, who just so happens to be a woman. In this sprightly 70s period romp from Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton (Little Miss Sunshine), Billie Jean King (Emma Stone) may not be an underdog on the court, but she is certainly one off it. “Watch out guys, there’s no stopping this little lady,” is how one sports anchor describes the player’s record-breaking form in 1972, and that patronising tone goes all the way to the top of the United States National Lawn Tennis Association.

The true fight King faces is with this boys' club institution, who brazenly pay her and her fellow female professionals one tenth of the prize winnings of their male counterparts. The battle of the title, meanwhile, is the most publicised match in the history of tennis, which saw King accept a challenge to take on Bobby Riggs (Steve Carell), an over-the-hill former number one who claimed he could beat any woman on the tennis court, despite being 55 and out of shape.

As depicted in Battle of the Sexes, the match is both a pantomime and deadly serious. King only agrees to participate because Riggs has already played an exhibition match against the current women’s number one, Australian Margaret Court, trouncing her in straight sets. It's an outcome that was humiliating for all women players on the circuit, and threatens to derail their demands to be paid as handsomely as the men.

Taking a place in Riggs’ three ring circus is the last thing King wants to deal with, however. Not only has she recently set up the Women’s Tennis Association with chain-smoking publisher Gladys Heldman (a delightful Sarah Silverman), she’s starting to accept that she’s gay after beginning an earth-shattering affair with Marilyn Barnett (Andrea Riseborough), a hairdresser she meets on tour. The latter personal revelation is explored with all the rigour you’d expect from a film with one eye on mainstream appeal, which is to say with very little rigour at all.

Barnett isn’t the only character in King’s life to get short shrift. Her friends on the women’s tour barely register and her husband, Larry (Austin Stowell), who remains stoic when he cottons on to his wife’s affair, is similarly underwritten and blandly performed. The result is that King’s personal life never come into focus, which of course means King never feels quite whole either, despite the spirited turn from Stone. If anything, the film give Carell's Riggs a more interesting inner life, with a forceful wife (Elisabeth Shue), a gang of locker room halfwits buddies and a rambunctious chip-off-the-old block son with whom Riggs can share his softer side.

While there’s little to get your teeth into in the script, there’s plenty to look at. The cinematographer is Swede Linus Sandgren – who shot Damien Chazelle’s La La Land and David O Russell’s American Hustle – and like those effervescent Oscar-winners, the sets and costumes prove endlessly expressive. Directing duo Faris and Dayton should also be complimented for the film’s visual bounce. Like their biggest hit, debut Little Miss Sunshine, Battle of the Sexes is all sunny colours and snappy edits, but you long for a bit of the spikiness they showed in the underrated feminist satire Ruby Sparks. Without that film’s edge, this third feature feels at times a bit glib, in spite of its aesthetic charms.

In the context of the modern world, it’s tempting to read Riggs as a Trump-like figure, another publicity-hungry clown who wanted to challenge a much more talented woman for dominance. You’ll pump your fist and cheer along as King puts her bozo rival, and by extension the patriarchy, in its place. Walking back into the real world, however, might feel a tad deflating. The film seems to suggest that King’s victory was game, set and match for gender equality, but anyone who’s been living with their eyes open for the past five decades will realise this epic grudge match is far from over.