The title of “Borg vs. McEnroe” (which came out Friday in limited release and on video on demand) doesn’t lie: Björn Borg is the primary character, John McEnroe the secondary one. Though the principal claim to fame arising from the two names is McEnroe’s temper tantrums on the court, aimed largely at umpires and line judges, the movie—directed by the Danish filmmaker Janus Metz, with a script by the Swedish writer and director Ronnie Sandahl—looks much more closely at Borg’s youth and his rise to tennis preëminence. The action is focussed on the 1980 Wimbledon tournament, at which Borg, then twenty-four years old (played by Sverrir Gudnason), with four Wimbledon titles already under his belt, and McEnroe (played by Shia LaBeouf), twenty-one, with none, met in the finals. But much of the movie is backstory, and most of that backstory is Borg’s, because Sandahl and Metz locate a paradox in it that, in their telling, renders Borg’s character, and the tale of his rise, far more complex and compelling than McEnroe’s.
Though Borg’s reputation was that of a cold and unemotional tennis robot whose style of play, with his methodical baseline game and precisely placed shots, matched his dispassionate temperament, the filmmakers take care to show that Borg was actually possessed of a fiery character—that, as a fledgling competitor (he’s played as a child by Leo Borg, Björn’s real-life son, and as a mid-teen-ager by Marcus Mossberg), he was as much of a temperamental troublemaker as McEnroe was, and that his outbursts nearly cost him his toehold in Swedish tennis. His savior was his coach, Lennart Bergelin (Stellan Skarsgård), who in the film helps him to both acknowledge the competitive edge that his “rage, fear, and panic” give him and control his behavior so that those fires don’t interfere with his game but, rather, silently fuel it.
In the course of the action, Borg doesn’t spend much time thinking or talking about McEnroe, but, for McEnroe, Borg is an object of obsession. In one of the movie’s most gleeful scenes, set in a London night club on the eve of the tournament, McEnroe is out for a night of partying with a group of tennis players that includes another New Yorker, Vitas Gerulaitis (Robert Emms), who, in a rapid-fire monologue illustrated with dramatic inserts, explains to McEnroe the complicated character of the opponent he’s planning to meet in the finals. Over the din of disco music and surrounded by young women who are the objects of his lascivious attention, the garrulous and flamboyant Gerulaitis (who died in 1994) suggests that Borg is something of an obsessive, and he runs through the many varieties of those obsessions—that he tests with his feet the fifty rackets that his coach strings for him; that he only lets his parents attend the tournament every other year and then requires them to wear the same clothing that they did the previous time; that he keeps his hotel room (the same one each time) refrigerator-cold to keep his pulse below fifty; that, courtside, he always occupies the same seat and always takes two towels. Gerulaitis sums up his findings: “They say he’s an iceberg, but he’s really a volcano keeping it all in, until . . . boom!”
Gerulaitis, whose convenient place in the action (he had been Borg’s practice partner and close friend and, in 1977, had lost to him at Wimbledon, in a long and gruelling match—details that the script leaves out) turns him into a ready-made mouthpiece for the director and the screenwriter, also explains that Borg’s four Wimbledon titles and his other Grand Slam victories make him the relentless target of fans, promoters, and operators, whom he struggles to avoid, making him “the loneliest fucking guy on the planet.” In part, what “Borg vs. McEnroe” dramatizes is the intrusion of media machinery into the formerly genteel realm of world-class tennis. Early in the film, Borg is seen, shortly before his departure for the 1980 Wimbledon tournament, in Monaco, where he’s living, pursued by autograph seekers and swarmed by fans, dealing with them jovially, impatiently, indifferently—but, in any case, adding the problems of a newly minted celebrity to his realm of athletic concerns.
“Borg vs. McEnroe” has the virtue of laying its filmmakers’ point of view on the line, finding a dramatic mode for an essentially essayistic intervention on their movie’s main ideas. That declamatory clarity of purpose seems to have suffused their approach to the rest of the film; Gudnason’s performance, as Borg, has a mask-like blankness that, under its impassive composure and distracted diffidence, maintains a wary tension that’s tested, shaped, and knowingly manipulated by Lennart, a former tennis sensation himself. Metz composes the clashes of the wise but relentless Lennart (a role that Skarsgård inhabits with an urgent dialectical intelligence) and the tautly controlled but impulsive Borg in tremulous, cannily confrontational wide-screen compositions shrewdly edited to leave an extra breath of troubled silence around the dialogue and the gestures. (Metz takes a similarly open-eyed and curious approach to Borg’s scenes with his fiancée, Mariana Simionescu, played by Tuva Novotny, whose practical attentiveness to the lure and burden of Borg’s fame is matched by her plainspoken decisiveness and good-humored guidance of him through a world that he seems to be half-dreaming through.) Essentially, the movie implies that, despite appearances to the contrary, Borg and McEnroe were inwardly very similar—and different mainly in their behavior. What the drama suggests is that the pressure to maintain appearances, to keep his furies under control and channelled, exacted a very high emotional price on Borg.
As for McEnroe, he’s presented as a fanatic of his own sort—the key element of his backstory shows him, as a child (played by Jackson Gann), being trotted out by his father (Ian Blackman), at a dinner party, as a math prodigy. During the Wimbledon campaign, that systematic intelligence is on display in his hotel room, where he diagrams the tournament draw on the wall and plans his run-up to the finals, where he expects to face Borg. But most of what the film shows about McEnroe’s professional life is what everyone knows—he’s seen ranting at officials and being chastised and punished by them for his outbursts. LaBeouf doesn’t leave much of an impression in the role, because he isn’t given much to work with—he’s mainly there to glower and fulminate, to provide a wild foil for Borg’s conflicted character, and to offer a measure of prurient suspense regarding his bad behavior that’s anticipated during their match.
That match, of course, is what the movie is building toward. Almost the entire last third of the film is devoted to the climactic battle on Wimbledon’s Centre Court, and that’s where Metz hits the cinematic wall. The five-set, nearly four-hour battle, complete with its celebrated thirty-four-point tiebreaker (in the course of which McEnroe saved five match points), is distilled to key moments and reproduced in action that, from the perspective of character, is of interest only to the extent that it shows McEnroe managing to keep his temper—with a little help from Borg, who, at a side change, offers him words of encouragement to keep his focus on the game. Movie directors have the power to film a sport in ways that differ drastically from the familiar patterns in which television broadcasts confine it. Metz doesn’t take advantage of those possibilities; his images of the match merely illustrate the results of each significant point that the broadcast announcers call. There’s no focus on footwork, on the violent stopping and starting on the court, on the frightening power of a serve or a smash. There’s also no depiction of the players’ individual aesthetics—mention is merely made, by the game’s commentators, of the contrast between Borg’s baseline game and McEnroe’s net-rushing style, but Metz doesn’t have a visual sensibility to put that contrast into images. “Borg vs. McEnroe” is an anecdotally gratifying, psychologically nuanced, and dramatically agile character study of Borg, but, despite its extended depictions of a celebrated match, it’s not a satisfying tennis movie at all.
