BATTLE OF THE SEXES (2017) ***

Before Andy Kaufman wrestled women in bouts of intergender wrestling buffoonery, Bobby Riggs challenged women tennis players to show man’s superiority on the tennis court.  Of course, that all backfired on him when Billie Jean King mopped the court with Riggs on national television.  Battle of the Sexes is a dramatized version of the events leading up to that fateful match.

While Riggs (Steve Carell) runs his mouth and puts on a good show for the cameras, King (Emma Stone) tries to keep her head down and train hard for the match.  She’s hoping that all the publicity will allow her to make a stand for equal rights and feminism.  She doesn’t want any needless distractions around.  Naturally, that’s just what she gets in the form of Marilyn (Andrea Riseborough), a hairdresser she becomes romantically entangled with while on tour.  Since this is the ‘70s we’re talking about, King must keep the relationship quiet because if the media found out about her lesbian affair, it would bring an abrupt end to her career.  

Directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris (who also collaborated with Carell on Little Miss Sunshine) get a bit heavy-handed while delivering the movie’s messages.  A lot of the on-the-nose dialogue hammers home King’s dilemma with the subtlety of a hundred-mile-an-hour tennis serve.  Once the film switches gears and turns into an honest to God sports movie, it quickly rights itself and becomes a rather irresistible underdog story.  The finale is surprisingly suspenseful too, even if you already know the outcome.

The thing about Riggs is, he’s pretty likeable.  He’s not an out-and-out bad guy.  He just misses the limelight and sees the battle of the sexes matches as get-rich-quick scheme.  He goes so over the top with his whole male chauvinist performance (his insults are kind of funny) that he becomes a caricature of a villain.  I mean he can be only taken about as seriously as your average wrestling heel. 

Even King doesn’t really have a problem with his overboard blustering.  Her real issue is with the sexist men behind the scenes who want hold women back.  While Riggs is using the chauvinist thing as a publicity stunt, these guys actually talk the talk.

The cast is uniformly excellent and help to anchor the movie whenever it threatens to get too preachy.  Carell gives a terrific performance and makes what could’ve been a one-dimensional cretin likeable and well-rounded.  The scene where he goes to Gamblers Anonymous and puts down the people in the group for being bad gamblers is hysterical.  Stone does an equally fine job as King.  Halfway through the movie, you kind of forget it’s her, which is about as good of a compliment as you can give.  The supporting cast is a veritable who’s who featuring everyone from Bill Pullman (sexist asshole) to Elizabeth Shue (Riggs’ long-suffering wife) to Fred Armisen (Riggs’ “vitamin consultant”), all of whom do a great job.  Alan Cumming in particular does wonders, giving a thinly-written role a hefty amount of gravitas.