Review: Finding John McEnroe “In the Realm of Perfection”

“The origin of sport as we know it and the origin of film are pretty much contemporaneous. Edison’s kinetoscope originally showed films of boxers boxing. The history of film is really the history of sports film.” — Julien Faraut

In Julien Faraut’s John McEnroe: In the Realm of Perfection the confines of a tennis court are just that: confines that form a kind of prison. The players and the ball move in relation to a grid whose arbitrary lines almost mockingly define success and failure, agony and glory.

In 1984, McEnroe enjoyed far more success than failure. His win percentage of 96.5% remains the highest ever, but if the film is to be believed, he achieved it through joyless means.

For long stretches of Faraut’s film, McEnroe stares unbelieving at phantom marks left in the clay by balls he insists are “on the line” but are instead called “out” by court officials. No explanation of verdict can satisfy him, so deep is the pain of injustice. Roland Garros, where much of the story takes place, remains the last Grand Slam to eschew hawkeye technology in confirming lines calls. Once confirmed, the chair umpire’s judgment is final.

Faraut’s documentary, culled from footage of the 1984 French Open, is unrelenting in its gaze on McEnroe. He’s quite literally under the microscope for the entirety of the film’s 95 minute run time. Add in the desert-like conditions of Roland Garros’s clay courts and that inescapable grid of the tennis court, and the film establishes a hotbox tension that only hints at what McEnroe must have felt on the court.

The film reveres McEnroe’s creativity on the tennis court: the variety he employed in his shots, his deft touch, and the way he sought to manipulate time. The film goes so far as to suggest that many of McEnroe’s tantrums were in part tactically motivated, a way to disrupt his opponent’s rhythm and assert control over a match. In this respect, McEnroe is like an artist, a filmmmaker who determines when to start rolling, when to yell “cut!” and when to push a few buttons to get the best performance out of his actor — himself.

For all his artistry (or perhaps because of it), McEnroe never appears comfortable on the court. The film examines every obsessive twitch, frown, pout, castigation, and outburst of violence, right alongside slow motion sequences of balletic serves and backhands.

The irony is that the audience — both theater-goers and the crowds pictured at his matches — laugh at McEnroe’s distress. They see in him the struggle against life’s little injustices, the adrenaline that bubbling anger can impart, the fantasy of acting and speaking freely, decorum be damned.

What the film so effectively suggests is that McEnroe was anything but free. Whether suffering the intrusion of a camera, a bad call from the linesman, or the tides of his own roiling emotions, McEnroe comes off like a caged animal. Brilliant, highly-functional, but caged no less.

By the film’s climax, at the 1984 French Open final between McEnroe and Ivan Lendl, it’s thoroughly created the impression Lendl was ultimately the freer of the two. Up two sets, agonizingly close to perfection, a dark cloud seems to envelop McEnroe out of nowhere and he never recovers. Even now, comfortably retired and celebrated as an icon, McEnroe isn’t free, forever haunted by that match and what could have been.

Originally published at www.fifteenfortytennis.com.