Ice and fire on the tennis court

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This article was published 19/04/2018 (2196 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Tennis greats Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe met on a field of battle in Wimbledon in 1980 when Borg was 24 (and already had four Wimbledon titles to his credit) and McEnroe was just 21.

Going by the title of this film by Danish filmmaker Janus Metz, you could assume this might be some kind of double biopic that bounces its narrative between the two men in a duplication of the way our attention is divided on either side of the net in a tennis match.

In fact, it’s very much Borg’s story, and rightly so. McEnroe tended to put his personality out there, making a name for himself as a “SuperBrat” for the way he vociferously challenged referees’ calls and played head games with his opponents. Borg was more of an enigma — “ice” to McEnroe’s “fire.” He came off as cool, calculating and methodical in his strategy.

In fact, as the script by Ronnie Sandahl shows, Borg (Swedish actor Sverrir Gudnason, dramatically set on “simmer”) was more like McEnroe than commonly understood. The film depicts the athlete as an obsessive-compulsive who indulged in painstaking rituals during competitions, including setting his hotel rooms to near freezing temperatures to bring down his heart rate and walking on his tennis racquets to ensure they were properly strung.

He saves his fiery, McEnroe-like outbursts for his coach, Lennart Bergelin (Stellan Skarsgård), who has made a career out of controlling Borg’s secret raging tendencies. (Although Bergelin’s patience is ultimately shown to be as finite as the linesmen on whom McEnroe habitually heaped abuse).

LaBeouf, 31, seems a little too old to play the 21-year-old McEnroe, but the casting is canny anyway. Something of a hothead himself, he convincingly accesses McEnroe’s volcanic temperament, but he also seems to understand McEnroe’s core of loneliness — a quality that would impel the American into a lasting friendship with Borg that, in the context of their epic competition, makes total sense.

It makes for an unconventional sports movie, but a satisfying one. If Metz doesn’t quite succeed in translating Borg/McEnroe’s awesome athleticism to the screen, he does sell the notion that the real action happens not on the tennis court, but between the ears of its competitors.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca Twitter: @FreepKing