Wimbledon (2004)

Peter Colt is a British tennis professional whose ranking has slid from eleventh to one hundred nineteenth, a decline he meets with the mild resignation of a man whose wealthy family never required him to fight for anything. He arrives at Wimbledon on a wild card, intending one final tournament before a comfortable job at a club. Then a hotel key mix-up deposits him in the shower of Lizzie Bradbury, an American rising star, and the machinery of the romantic comedy engages. Richard Loncraine directs with the smooth efficiency of a man assembling flat-pack furniture. Nothing here aspires to more than pleasant.

Lizzie is the film's most interesting problem. Kirsten Dunst plays her as driven, ambitious, and entirely aware of her own trajectory, which makes it all the more dispiriting when the screenplay converts her into a motivational instrument for the male lead's redemption arc. She loses her semifinal because of a tryst the script arranges, breaks up with him over it, then returns from the airport to hand him the tactical secret of his opponent's serve. Her own Wimbledon titles arrive in a closing caption, off-screen, as an afterthought. The gesture is faint but it registers.

The remaining ledger is bare. The cast is uniformly white and Anglophone, the sport depicted as a rarefied enclave of fit, comfortable people with no racial dimension, no queer presence, no environmental concern, no body-positivity, no neurodivergence, and no historical argument to make. Peter comes from money and the film regards the commercial apparatus of professional tennis with uncomplicated affection. Roger Ebert observed that this is a well-behaved movie about nice people who have good things happen to them. He meant it kindly. It is also the most accurate description of the film's emptiness.