Pelé: Birth of a Legend (2016)

Pelé: Birth of a Legend arrives with the full apparatus of the inspirational sports biopic: the barefoot boy in the Bauru dirt, the father who once played and now cleans floors, the World Cup promise whispered over a radio. What distinguishes it from its many cousins is the casting. The Zimbalist brothers shot entirely in Brazil and filled the frame with Black Brazilian performers, Seu Jorge and Milton Gonçalves among them, which lends the film a texture of lived Afro-Brazilian life that a Hollywood production would have sanded smooth. That alone earns a measure of respect.

The film's central argument concerns Ginga, the style drawn from capoeira and the resistance of escaped slaves. De Brito delivers a monologue that walks us through the sixteenth century, the outlawing of capoeira, and Brazil's turn against its own African heritage after 1950. It is a genuine lecture, delivered with a straight face, and it makes race the organizing subject of the whole enterprise. A nation's shame over its African roots becomes the thing the boy must outrun, and the 1958 victory becomes a reconciliation with that heritage. Few sports films reach for so much.

Elsewhere the picture is conventional to the point of anemia. Pelé's mother exists to look worried in a doorway. Poverty is an obstacle to be sprinted past, not a system to be questioned. There are no queer lives, no disabled bodies, no environmental anxieties, no interiority beyond the pitch. Vincent D'Onofrio coaches. The Swedes lose. Critics were unkind on release, and their complaints about depth were not baseless, though they overlooked how much the film quietly insists upon. It is earnest, frequently clumsy, and more interesting than its reception suggests.