![[Prefontaine]](prefontaine970127.gif)
"Prefontaine"
Directed by Steve James. Starring Jared Leto.
by GARY KAMIYA
the appeal of jock films is hard to explain. The genre is sentimental, melodramatic and clichéd — but we keep coming back, choking up as yet another boxer bounces off the ropes, another ice skater overcomes her secret fear, another coach gets through to the troubled kid with the golden arm. Perhaps it's their simplicity that draws us. In sports, ambiguities are burned away; unlike life, which always seems to end in a tie, you know whether you won or lost. Movies about athletes are heart-stirring mirrors because they tell us that our own lives are not just a jumble of haphazard events, that they, too, are sagas, filled with triumphs and defeats. They remind us that in the movie of our lives, too, a distant bugler is somewhere playing. And at their best, they honor a mystery: whatever primal impulse it is that drives someone to sacrifice everything to throw farther, or jump higher, or run faster.
"Prefontaine," the corny documentary-style feature about the late, great middle-distance runner Steve Prefontaine, has no business being as engaging as it is. For sports fans, a fascinating free-spirit halo has always hung over the man called "Pre," but as presented here, his short life was only moderately interesting. He was a cocky golden boy who, after failing to medal at the Olympics, took up the cause of amateur athletes' rights before dying in a car crash at the age of 24 — that's pretty much it. Prefontaine wasn't a towering figure in sports history. He was one of the all-time great collegiate runners, setting many American records, but he finished fourth in the 5,000 meters at the 1972 Munich Games and all of his American records have long been broken.
Nor is there anything sophisticated or risky about the directorial approach taken by Steve James. James, who is best known for his stirring (if slightly sentimental) documentary "Hoop Dreams," takes it right down the middle of the feel-good road: This is filmmaking in a higher-IQ Disney style, frequently verging on terminal sappiness, all heart-quickening-guitar-music, coming-around-the-last-turn, legs-pumping-toward-glory stuff. "Prefontaine," which was made with the approval of the late runner's family, avoids digging beneath the surface: What you see is what you get. Even the most structurally interesting thing about the film, that it doesn't have a conventional hero-wins story (Prefontaine lost in the biggest race of his life) undercuts its drama. Yes, Prefontaine did come back from his crushing defeat to run and win again. He did mature somewhat. But there's nothing larger than life about the shape of his life. There are no grand transformations, no epiphanies here.
What makes this slight film affecting, in the end, is both James' manifest love and understanding of athletics and, oddly, the ordinariness of Prefontaine's life. James' guts 'n' glory style, his use of broad, heart-tugging strokes, appropriately captures the passion and romance of athletic striving. But — with some tear-jerking exceptions — he usually doesn't push bombast too far. He leaves the small victories and defeats of Prefontaine's off-track life the size they really were.
And in the track scenes, James shines — helped immeasurably by Jared Leto (who appeared in the late, lamented TV show "My So-Called Life"). Leto acts OK, in an appropriately simple kind of way, but forget his acting — the kid can run. In a movie like this, which is in the end about nothing but running, a pretty stride is worth two Gielguds and a Keitel.
Prefontaine wasn't just someone who ran: He was a runner. This movie never explains where his inner drive came from: It's probably not something that can be known. But even through "Prefontaine's" obviousness, we feel its force.
Of all the cinema's metaphors, shots of someone running are among the most affecting, because they aren't just metaphors: Running is real and metaphorical, an emblem of human striving and the striving itself. The most moving shot in "Prefontaine" shows the undersized 9-year-old Pre running angrily down the street after getting beaten up in a football game. His childish legs waver as his feet hit the pavement, then majestically turn into the strong, sure legs of an adult, striding down the street and into his own future. It's not a mythically heroic future, but one not without its own glory.
"Hamlet" By Scott Rosenberg (1/20/97) |