Movies
Without Limits
Robert Towne's "biopic" on middle-distance runner Steve Prefontaine was beaten to the finish line early in 1997 by Steve James's prosaically named Prefontaine, and it then fell back an extra year in the reasonable hope that the competing film would have been forgotten. Without question this later arrival is a higher-grade production, or, if you prefer, a slicker concatenation of clichés: slo-mo athletic action, amplified sound effects, triumphant trumpet, goldie-oldies for period, and so on. But at the end of the day, it deals with the same set of facts. And forgettable though it was, the cut-rate Disney production, in its dogged pseudo-documentary way, did a more thorough job with them: as, for example, with the protagonist's long-running struggle against AAU bureaucrats, or with his actual track record. (The Towne film creates the impression that the Oregonian cult hero arrived in Munich for the 1972 Olympics having never lost a race in his life.) It seems a laudable idea, especially in a culture so winning-obsessed as ours, to center a movie around a man who in the biggest race of his career finished a disappointing fourth, out of the medals altogether. But the man at the center of this particular movie is lauded as something more than a mere winner: a true "artist." And the great Lasse Viren (who in his superior finesse and tactics, as against Prefontaine's "pure guts," better wears the artist's mantle) isn't even given the courtesy of a decent build-up as an antagonist. Of course it's unthinkable in this culture to propose a movie on these same events which would reverse the roles of protagonist and antagonist, with the stoical, cagy, and no less determined Finn heroically holding off the cocky, bullish, self-aggrandizing American. Billy Crudup, Donald Sutherland, Monica Potter. 1998.
Reader Rating:
MPAA Rating: PG-13