Eighty years have elapsed since Jesse Owens took home a record-breaking four gold medals from the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games, a haul that also proved a neat riposte to Aryan ideology.
That’s a long time to think about how to dramatise Owens’ historic victories and it shows in Joe Shrapnel and Anna Waterhouse impeccably researched screenplay. Wisely eschewing the cradle-to-grave format, Race trains its focus on the crucial period 1934-36, when Owens (played by Stephan James) blossomed into a world champion under the tutelage of coach Larry Snyder (Sudeikis).
Race begins with Owens’ admission to Ohio State University and Owens sticking it to Hitler. Between times, the film is honest enough to include the young athlete hooking up with a track groupie before slinking home to his fiancee (and later wife of 45 years) and thorough enough to include in-house bickering at the US Olympic Committee, as Avery Brundage (Irons) and Jeremiah Mahoney (Hurt) debate whether America should boycott the “Nazi Olympics” and in-house bickering in Berlin as Leni Riefenstahl (van Houten) and Joseph Goebbels (Metschurat) compete in the Best Black Propagandist event.
There are moments when Rachel Portman’s score is far too sugary, when DOP Peter Levy’s camera is too jittery, and when the script features too much biopic-speak (“At seven, I was picking up to 100 pounds of cotton a day”.) But at heart, Race is a classic underdog sports movie – from the director of Predator 2 if you can believe it – in which Owens must overcome prejudice, injury, political interference, and all the other athletes.
Stay tuned for the film’s most touching scene, when Owens (the charismatic James, who stepped into the role when John Boyega was cast in Star Wars) sits down for tea with German long-jump rival Carl “Luz” Long (David Kross).
