Concussion hits you with Serious Will Smith until you can’t think straight
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If you think a movie centered on establishing a link between pro football and a brain condition disproportionally suffered by NFL players — called chronic traumatic encephalopathy — sounds maybe a little slow, let me reassure you on three points.
One, have you watched an NFL game lately? Pretty fucking slow.
Two, Concussion — the bluntly titled, fact-based-ish movie in question — moves along no more lackadaisically than, say, a two-part episode of whatever CSI, NCIS, TGI Crime Day procedural you or your neighbors have made ratings hits. (Also, as in those shows, you get slides and brain matter and re-enactments.)
Three, it’s actually less a story about the collision of precise medical study, athletic grace, male heteronormative ideals of masculinity, and corporate secrecy — that is, it’s not what one would have hoped writer-director Peter Landesman would have made of Jeanne Marie Laskas’ stunning GQ article “Game Brain” — than it is the uplifting tale of a very serious, very saintly Will Smith scoring a sweet job interview. Merry Christmas, Dad.
Smith plays Dr. Bennet Omalu, a real-life forensic pathologist reduced in this telling to a never-ending show of signifiers about his goodness and his outsider status — he’s Nigerian (Smith’s accent is fine), he cares nothing about football in a Pittsburgh portrayed as having nothing else to care about, he drives his BMW to church every Sunday, and his African soulfulness alienates co-workers. A concussion-compromised brain that he analyzes as a matter of routine leads him to question how otherwise healthy people are suffering gruesome declines. Omalu comes to believe that football is the cause. No way, says a series of reliable actors playing ambivalent, football-loving white guys. Yes way, says Omalu, until Alec Baldwin drinks a glass of Louisiana accent, pronounces his love of the game but also his love of science, and agrees to help.
As Omalu gets crank calls, faces hostile foes and finds his job threatened, his gently paternalistic notes on assimilation to a pretty immigrant named Prema (Gugu Mbatha-Raw, good in a borderline unforgivable role) bud into love and marriage. Prema even teaches him how to appreciate football, in an abstract way. The lonely, heroic doctor is at last appreciated. Football players continue to die, however, so the lonely, heroic work goes on.
As more people dispute, then believe Omalu, his vision of America and being American renews focus. And so it is that the U.S. government sees his LinkedIn profile or something and tries to recruit him, whispering about benefits and how it’s time for him to serve his grateful adopted nation with his gifts. But Omalu turns down D.C. and stays in a California suburb, where he’s last seen watching children bash their little helmeted heads together, imitating the sport of red-blooded America at a high, doomed cost. Well, he tried.
