Wimbledon?

Of course, I haven’t even scratched the surface with that whole High Fidelity thing, but I spent today at St. Vincent College out in Latrobe playing in an ultimate frisbee tournament. And now the ubiquitous Saturday college football is on TV, so I’m thinking about sports movies. I know there are a lot of people out there who would bring up Rudy, Field of Dreams, Hoosiers, or even Major League here to my Any Given Sunday and Bend it Like Beckham, but I want to take a minute to talk about Wimbledon, that 2004 movie most people have never seen. I think that when people see something like that (it was billed as a romantic comedy for crying out loud), they assume automatically that it’s going to suck. Usually they’re right, but this time it isn’t so.

Instead, Wimbledon opens up with a rad and accurate voiceover describing the thought process of this likeable pro tennis player who is, of all things, an Englishman. As this is going on, you see the guy playing at some red-clay European event probably intended to resemble ATP tour’s actual Monte-Carlo event. Red clay, of course, is the most authentic, the most hard-core surface in pro tennis. There are professionals who could go through their whole careers without ever leaving the dirt. And even though (or perhaps, I’m willing to concede, because) events on that surface get horrible ratings in American and are famously unpopular here, that’s where we see our first glimpse of Peter Colt. This, for me, was an unexpected and creative way to start the film.

And it’s not just the beginning that’s good from a tennis player’s point of view. At no point in Wimbledon is there a scene in which someone practices in the pouring rain. Every other tennis movie I’ve seen includes such a scene, and any jackass who’s ever picked up a racquet knows that when tennis balls get wet, they simply don’t bounce. Therefore, it’s literally impossible to practice in the pouring rain. How does something so simple escape so many moviemakers? But this time, at least, it hasn’t.

Of course, I wouldn’t be talking about this if Mariah hadn’t suggested once when we were marooned in the Minneapolis/St. Paul airport for something like 10 hours that we rent one of those portable DVD players and watch a movie right there in the departures gate. Wimbledon was quite a suitable movie for a situation like that because it allows its viewers to escape completely into the story of, well, mostly of Peter Colt, but also of Lizzie Bradbury (played by Kirsten Dunst), a famous American woman at the top of the sport. But anyway, viewers are able to escape into their story in part because it’s done in a clever way that’s funny without the usual tired jokes of the romantic comedy genre. It also helps that their little tryst doesn’t quite overshadow the tennis. The film manages to do all of this while depicting something of the tradition of Wimbledon and the frenzy which surrounds it in England.

Wimbledon brings to mind the greatest Wimbledons I can recall. A number of years ago, I watched Patrick Rafter beat Andre Agassi on the grass in what might be the best match I’ve ever seen. Agassi played the best tennis of his career, and Rafter dove all over centre court to produce what might be the greatest single-match performance of all time. As I watched that match in Mike E’s room, back when he lived with JJ, Megan, and Mariah in the Skyla place in Missoula, I was jumping up and down, cheering to the TV, etc. Those of you who know me understand that I’m not generally the sort of person who does things like that, but hey man, it was Wimbledon. For a little over two weeks, there exists a society over there in England where hordes of real, normal people watch, care about, know about, and talk about tennis. They get excited about it. Something like that, as you can imagine, is quite appealing to me, and my DVD copy of Wimbledon enables me to experience a taste of that society for an hour and a half whenever I feel like it. And if that doesn’t constitute a good sports movie, I don’t know what does.

In the beginning, there was High Fidelity

Clearly, the logical place to start something like this is that film from the year 2000, that film entitled High Fidelity. Even if it didn’t bring about as original material the idea that what we read, listen to, and watch is important, certainly it gave a certain cinematic presence to it, or articulated it in ways the rest of us didn’t imagine. Its top-five lists and constant references to popular movies and music place it in the same genre as this potentially ill-fated blog. Without the popular culture surrounding it, the film High Fidelity couldn’t have existed in any meaningful way.

When I think actively about this movie, which I frequently do, I can’t help pondering the scene near the beginning of the film in which Rob and Dick are listening to “the new Belle & Sebastian” in the record store when Barry barges in and replaces Belle & Sebastian’s melodious melancholy with a mix tape populated by some kind of offensive 80s-sounding pop. Before Barry barges in, Dick lovingly and curiously mentions that what he and Rob are listening to is, in fact, “the new Belle & Sebastian.” I can’t help remembering at this point, from my own experience, Carolyn C’s awareness of said band in high school, and her presenting to several of us that album cover of “Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like a Peasant,” on which a woman seems to interrogate some manifestation of her own reflection. At any rate, I can recall Carolyn playing this music for us, and I can recall feeling as the result of this band’s work the same sort of comforting, homelike presence which Dick and Rob clearly experience in that early morning, workaday scene of High Fidelity. But then Barry comes in with his offensive mix tape, representing the mass of mainstream culture who have no appreciation for the harmonies of something like Belle & Sebastian. During that era, in the mid to late nineties, neither Carolyn nor I could very well have gone to school and talked to anyone about Belle & Sebastian. Bethel Park and Peters Township are not communities suited to the appreciation of that sort of cultural pleasure.

But apart from the Belle & Sebastian scene, the thing I revisit most frequently in High Fidelity has to be the scene featuring Rob standing outside, nearly under the L in the Chicago rain, yelling “Charlie! You fucking bitch! Let’s work it out!” toward his ex-girlfriend’s condensation-filled window. I’ve visited JJ and Megan’s place in Chicago and gone places on the L many times, and this scene seems to encapsulate that quintessentially Chicago experience while at the same time paying respect to the hurt everyone has felt at the breakup of some significant relationship. JJ and I have, at intervals too frequent to enumerate, recited this line to one another, albeit with mostly humorous intentions. Still, it’s at least a second something that resonates with the film’s audience, and this constitutes a presence in viewers’ minds that most films can’t claim to generate.