Eddie the Eagle (2016)

Eddie the Eagle arrives from 2016 with the confidence of a film that has checked no boxes and intends to check none. It concerns Michael Edwards, a British ski jumper of modest athletic gifts and immodest persistence, who represented his nation at Calgary in 1988 and finished last in two events with a smile. The cast is uniformly pale, the rivals are Norwegian, the officials are British, and the film regards this arrangement as weather: it simply is. No demographic arithmetic intrudes upon the screenplay. Taron Egerton wears thick glasses and a mustache of pure optimism, and Hugh Jackman, as his invented American coach, wears a leather jacket and regret. That is the whole of the arrangement.

The film's antagonist is the establishment, which here means men in blazers holding clipboards. They deny Eddie entry to teams and demand qualifying jumps from taller hills. This is bureaucratic gatekeeping, not an indictment of capital, and the film has no interest in redistributing anything except applause. Eddie's body is a running gag and a plot engine, his ungainly frame clattering down the inrun, but the movie frames his inadequacy as determination, never as a lesson about self-acceptance. He is eccentric and obsessive in the way of men who sleep in Finnish saunas, and the film lets this be personality, not diagnosis. Women appear at the edges, chiefly his mother, who worries. The snow is snow. The mountain is a mountain.

The film settles for a modest, sincere sermon on believing in oneself, delivered without a single social argument attached. The coach is fictional, confirmed as such by the real Edwards, which is ordinary biopic embroidery instead of any rewriting of history for ideological ends. We are left with a vintage of pure, unfortified inspiration. It is well made, it is warm, and it contains nothing of the present cultural moment whatsoever. A mild vintage, then, decanted with care and served at room temperature.