Battle of the Sexes (2017)

Battle of the Sexes arrives with the confident gait of a film that knows precisely which buttons it intends to press. It reconstructs the 1973 exhibition match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs, and it does so with the tidy craftsmanship of a prestige dramedy: warm lighting, sharp costumes, a Nicholas Britell score humming with import. Simon Beaufoy's script treats the fight for equal prize money as the spine of the story, and Jack Kramer's sneering contempt for women's tennis supplies a villain we can point at without ambiguity. The Original Nine sign their names, the tour is born, and the audience is invited to applaud. Competent. Agreeable. Entirely pleased with its own positions.

Emma Stone plays King with a tight, wary intelligence, and the film grants her a private life that a lesser production would have filed under trivia. Her affair with the hairdresser Marilyn Barnett is handled with sympathy and genuine tenderness, and the closing text, noting her eventual long-term relationship with a woman, extends that sympathy into the present tense. On race, the picture is nearly mute; this is a story about gender, and it declines to widen the lens. Riggs's gambling is presented as addiction, not as any matter of neurology, and no character pauses to contemplate the climate, their body image, or their position on a spectrum. The economic complaint never rises above the level of a payroll dispute.

So we have a well-tailored entertainment that smuggles its 2017 parallels into a 1973 setting and trusts us to notice. The sermon is brief but sincere. The tennis is better than the thesis. It is a pleasant vintage, poured with care, and it goes down without resistance, like a sports movie that has read the room and decided the room would prefer to be flattered.