Review: ‘John McEnroe’ Captures a Perfectly Imperfect Tennis Star
In 1984, John McEnroe played 85 tennis matches and lost only three. That’s basically perfect. The “realm,” though, in “John McEnroe: In the Realm of Perfection,” a documentary essay by Julien Faraut, implies approximation, propinquity, “almost.” He was in perfection’s neighborhood; human, fitfully and courtesy of actual fits. That record — the highest single-season win percentage in tennis’ so-called Open era (for a man) — remains all his. But statistics-driven godliness isn’t the sort of perfection that fascinates Faraut.
Posted — UpdatedHis movie is a dream of McEnroe, an amusing, hypnotic, whimsical, expertly constructed adventure in craft, built from hours and hours of archival footage of his early 1980s dominance, but only at Roland Garros (which hosts the French Open, which McEnroe never won). It aims to understand an athlete’s brilliance by turning his game inside out, flipping and reversing it, conjecturing about and psychologizing him, close reading the repetitive motion, quirks, and kinks, breaking down McEnroe’s breakdowns.
The guy’s wildly temperamental tennis would never be my first choice for such an acutely cinematic undertaking. But Faraut knows what he’s doing. And what he’s done is cull a fantasia — a kind of punk French new wave — from reels of old film. Those belonged to the director Gil de Kermadec, France’s first national technical director of tennis. He wanted to make instructional films, with star players doing prematch demonstrations. Those seemed fake to him. So he got the tournament to let him film the matches themselves, making natural portraits of players, their technique, style and personalities. The last of these was of John McEnroe.
The result is as strangely satisfying and oblong a rendering of a sport or athlete as I can think of, up there with Roland Barthes’ essay, from 1957, on the spectacle of professional wrestling, and Kon Ichikawa’s saga of the 1964 Olympics.
“In the Realm of Perfection” is slenderer, knottier, more self-consciously besotted than that. It’s both suitable for a minimally furnished den of midcentury modern collectors items and a movie Wes Anderson might have made about Richie Tenenbaum, of “The Royal Tenenbaums,” had life been kinder to Richie. And yet it doesn’t wink. It’s not an antique.
“In the Realm of Perfection” arrives a week before the U.S. Open starts. And a not-insignificant aspect of John McEnroe’s relationship to it — and other major tournaments — is now as a glorified spectator. He sits in a booth and comments, for ESPN, NBC and the BBC, on the tennis other people play — calmer, saner, safe from himself.
——
‘John McEnroe: In the Realm of Perfection’
Not rated. In French and English, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes.
Copyright 2024 New York Times News Service. All rights reserved.
