This Sporting Life (1963)

This film, which I caught last night on Netflix Instant, is the spiritual ancestor to The Wrestler in a lot of ways. It's a sports movie that's not about sports as much as it is about money and class, and it's a movie that hinges on a good script and an amazing central performance. Richard Harris as Frank functions as the John The Baptist to Robert De Niro's Jesus, much like the film foreshadows what will be happening in the seventies, namely gritty realism and very mature story telling.

Where this movie really stands out from the august pack is that the central relationship feels incredibly real. Most films focus on relationships that end, or that will be. This film is about a man who wants to love and be loved, but the woman he loves just cannot love him back. This interplay gives the film its thematic weight, where we have a man who wants desperately to be seen as a man, but the most that others can give him is to see him as a sort of performing animal. As such, nothing in Frank's life is quite real.

If anything, the film is about being trapped in the games that we must all play (Frank's unrequited lover does not requite because she sticks to her role as a widow, for example), and the desire to do something that feels real. The film takes place in a world where nothing is consummated or fulfilled, and its tragedy is that Frank wants out, or at least wants change in the rules, but the best he can do is keep playing the game.

On a technical level, the film is a masterpiece. The black and white is perfect, giving the film a real classic look, with the camera and editing playing on narrative tools that would not become standard for at least another ten years. The film offers the best of two approaches to film, the more classical and the grittier seventies realism, and blends them masterfully. The result is something that is grounded in reality, but still hits on the poetic.

Great film.

Well, all that's... unfortunate, to say the least.

As for the final sequence, it's a little hard for me to give a reading of that without giving a reading of the entire film, and I can hardly do that convincingly in a concise way. So, if you bear with me and take this brief articulation on faith, hopefully I can make some sense of it.

Anyway, I see Frank as a man whose sentiments, and his honesty of those sentiments, is at odds with the life that he has to live. The presence of Rugby in the story is not so much to provide a means for Frank to distinguish himself, but rather to provide a representation of the pattern of his life off the field. Essentially, his entire existence is a game, and if Frank is not entirely conscious of it, he at least feels it to some extent. He obviously wants to love more deeply than he is really allowed to. I'm mainly thinking of one of the many confrontations between Frank and Margaret where she is screaming about how she's simply a "kept woman," but he wants her to be more than that (Obviously, there's more going on in the film than this).

Basically, my read of the film is Frank desperately wanting to feel more connected to his own life, to have it feel real (i.e. to escape the game in some sense). As such, I see the ending sequence as the game of life itself having won the conflict presented in the film. Frank is defeated and stuck.