Most sports dramas have an athlete overcoming obstacles on the field. However, Race’s protagonist Jesse Owens (Stephan James) faces them outside. Owens’s conflict is not the struggle with his own physicality, as we see in the week’s other release The Program , a biopic of Lance Armstrong.
Owens is a natural runner, we learn, as Coach Larry Snyder (Jason Sudeikis) lets him know that ‘naturals’ don’t equate to winners. But Owens proves himself as one in every trial at the Ohio State University, gliding down the track with ease as if winning is his birthright.
Owens’s conflicts are therefore emotional. His dilemma is whether he should participate in the Summer Olympics of 1936 in Berlin or instead send a strong political message against Nazi oppression as a representative of the Afro-American people of the USA. But what if he wins at the greatest sporting event of the time and gets a chance to publicly destroy Hitler’s Aryan Supremacy theory?
Race may be a biopic, but its centrepiece is the Olympic Games that turned Owens into a living legend where he won four gold medals, setting new world records. It does a neat job of taking us through the emotional intensity and pressure of an athlete when he is put in a historic situation like this.
And the film ticks all the boxes of an underdog sports movie: the tough-but-ultimately-well-wishing coach, the supporting wife (Shanice Banton) and history pitted against our hero.
The build-up is not as engaging as the Olympics though. The period hues of the 1930s America are a little stagey and predictable. The film is more effective once Owens sets foot in Berlin. The scenes inside the Olympic stadium are particularly charged with an energy that is infectious. And then, there is the pleasure of watching nuggets of history recreated: the US Olympic Committee’s last-minute suspension of their Jewish athletes after succumbing to pressure from the German committee, Hitler’s alleged refusal to shake hands with Owens and the unexpected generosity of Owens’ German competitor Luz Long. Race also shows us, in flashes, the mini-triumph of early cinema with Leni Riefenstal (Carice van Houten), the legendary Nazi propaganda filmmaker on the sidelines. Her documenting of the Olympic Games proved groundbreaking to the future of sports photography.
Where Race fumbles is its uni-dimensional portrayal of characters: while Owens comes across as a sincere, hard-working man with a good heart, Snyder is given the coaching clichés such as one with a promising but failed past.
Race is an occasionally enjoyable traditional Hollywood biopic without the complexities of its subject.
