Review: Concussion

Set in the early 00s, Will Smith plays Nigerian-born forensic pathologist Dr. Bennet Omalu, who uncovers something very concerning to him about a recent crop of former American football players who exhibited erratic and violent behaviour before taking their own lives. Dr. Omalu (who has never watched a game of football nor has much interest in such matters) discovers a degenerative brain disease caused by multiple concussions, a disease he labels Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (or CTE for short). Dr. Omalu lives and works in Pittsburgh, a football mad city and home to the Steelers. Needless to say that his published findings in a medical journal warning of the effects of repeated head-on collisions in gridiron does not go over well with the NFL, nor the people of Pittsburgh. He’s accused of hating football and wanting to destroy the NFL itself by the seemingly wilfully ignorant. However, with more and more cases cropping up, Dr. Omalu soon finds an unlikely ally in longtime former Steelers team doctor Julian Bailes (Alec Baldwin) who starts to become alarmed, and frankly a little ashamed and agrees to help Dr. Omalu before even more great athletes have to die. Gugu Mbatha-Raw plays Prema, a nurse and Kenyan immigrant who will eventually become the shy and bookish Dr. Omalu’s wife. Albert Brooks plays Dr. Omalu’s superior, Dr Ceryl Wercht who ends up targeted by the FBI in an effort to get at Dr. Omalu for supposedly wanting to ruin America’s beloved gladiatorial sport. David Morse and Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje play former football players.

 

This 2015 film from writer-director Peter Landesman (who was previously screenwriter of the interesting “Kill the Messenger”) is ultimately fascinating, important, and the chosen subject Dr Bennet Omalu, is quite clearly a bloody genius the world is lucky to have. It does seem a bit odd to focus solely on football when wrestling is full of concussion horrors (Including the case of He Who Shall Not Be Named on WWE TV), and one of the characters in this film, Dr. Maroon (played here as an ignorant, cold-hearted shitbag by Arliss Howard) is actually currently a consultant for WWE. This isn’t his story though, and if the film did focus on him and wrestling, he’d come off even worse. It’s Dr. Omalu’s story, and not being entirely familiar with him I’ll accept that the wrestling industry was never his focus. I’m just surprised that a film with Dr. Maroon as a character doesn’t even bring wrestling up even once.

 

I haven’t always been on board with Will Smith as an actor, but the guy oozes charisma and in the right part he can be effective. Although playing a mild-mannered and introverted man, he gives a showy performance here with a perhaps slightly overdone ‘foreign’ accent (that occasionally heads closer to the Caribbean than Nigeria), but by and large he’s hard to resist. He’s not so showy that it goes against the modest nature of the character, I guess it’s a showy kind of understated that he offers up, if that makes sense. He’ll never be a great actor, but Smith is charismatic as hell and is clearly getting better as a thespian. I thought he was thoroughly unpersuasive and muted in “Ali” (despite the Oscar nomination), a role he really ought to have nailed, if you ask me. He was good in “Enemy of the State” and has, however given a fine dramatic performance in the underrated “Seven Pounds”. Here, he’s even better. He’s very persuasive.

 

Landesman is smart to surround Smith with some really strong character actors just in case Smith didn’t quite bring it to the table. He does, but he’s not the only one making a strong showing. Although he has an appalling makeup job that has him looking like Frankenstein’s monster, David Morse is immediately worrying and affecting as a former athlete now left in a very confused and volatile state. He makes a helluva impression in such a short amount of time. In a more prominent role, Alec Baldwin’s barely (and sporadically) there Southern accent doesn’t tarnish what is an otherwise rock-solid job as a conscientious sports doctor who helps Dr. Omalu. Albert Brooks is even better in a dramatic turn, and the make-up job on him isn’t too bad, either. I never did buy Luke Wilson as Roger Goodell though, as he neither looks (the hair isn’t even right!) nor sounds remotely like the very public NFL commissioner and isn’t remotely convincing. Why in the hell didn’t they get Greg Kinnear to play him? (BTW, Goodell comes off really, really badly here). To be honest though, the only drawback of this film for me is the all-too cutesy forced romance. True story or not, it rings false. Every other facet to the Omalu character and Smith performance pretty much works for me, as does the film itself. However, the rather awkward/shy romance thing just didn’t convince me. I also wasn’t quite convinced of the scenes where Omalu’s wife is being followed, true or not that seemed too ‘Hollywood’ to me.

 

This is a really good story and an important one, and it really makes you appreciate what a remarkable guy Dr. Omalu is/was. Brooks’ character has a speech that really says it all. Yanks love their football, Pittsburgh loves the Steelers. Good luck trying to change things, buddy. Talk about an uphill battle. Like with head-butts and chair shots in wrestling, no one wants to ruin the ‘fun’, but shit happens that destroys the participants’ health. In wrestling, the impact can be minimised by removing some of these tropes that involve head impacts, but American football? They already wear helmets! So you can see how hard it would’ve been to change hearts and minds. The concussion rage might seem to play out in slightly corny fashion here, but it’s kind of unavoidable. The athletes aren’t the main characters in the film. This shit really does happen, and not just in football. Any wrestling fan over the age of say 20 knows who and what I’m talking about.

 

An interesting story about a good and frankly very brave man. It’s also a film about a really important subject, and features a pretty persuasive lead performance by Will Smith as a man far more socially awkward than the ebullient and likeably cocky star normally projects himself. This is solid stuff, falling just outside my Top 10 of 2015, a pretty good year for film.

 

Rating: B