Review

Concussion

Dr. Julian Bailes (Alec Baldwin) confers with Dr. Bennet Omalu (Will Smith) in Peter Landesman’s cautionary tale about willful ignorance and head trauma, Concussion.
Dr. Julian Bailes (Alec Baldwin) confers with Dr. Bennet Omalu (Will Smith) in Peter Landesman’s cautionary tale about willful ignorance and head trauma, Concussion.

One of the things we forget about Will Smith is that the man can act.

Seriously, he's usually good. He makes bad choices sometimes, and there's the nepotism thing and the Scientology thing and the White House thing and all the vaguely portentous self-aggrandizing things he seems to say whenever he's around a live microphone. (This just in: Smith was "joking" about being forced to run for president if we don't all calm down.) But he's generally a good actor.

Concussion

82 Cast: Will Smith, Alec Baldwin, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Albert Brooks, David Morse, Arliss Howard, Luke Wilson, Bitsie Tulloch

Director: Peter Landesman

Rating: PG-13, for thematic material including some disturbing images, and language

Running time: 123 minutes

He has a talent for it, and in the right role -- I'm thinking of Six Degrees of Separation, which was, what? 22 years ago! -- he can be sensational.

And he's pretty good as Dr. Bennet Omalu in Concussion. Omalu is the Nigerian native who identified and named chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) in 2002. CTE is the concussion-related brain disease that has been found in a number of athletes in contact sports -- especially professional football and hockey players -- after their deaths. So far there has been no test developed to diagnose CTE while a person is still alive.

Smith is not the problem with Concussion, which is a formulaic and moderately rousing procedural that pits a naive and heroic truth-teller/victim against murky, super-powerful corporate forces. He manages to convey a sense of the doctor as an honorable man befuddled by the pushback even though he's called upon to deliver a couple of clunky lectures and wag his finger at a neurologist played by Arliss Howard while spitting "Tell the troof ... tell the troof" through clenched teeth.

No, the problem is that Concussion, which started out as an angry, savage takedown of the smug and untouchable National Football League, or at least a moral inquiry into the mass psychology of gladiatorial sports, turns out to be conventional Oscar-bait.

Omalu is depicted as a stainless hero, immune to the charms of American football perhaps, but otherwise dreadfully Eagle Scouty. He is a throwback, cornball hero -- Jimmy Stewart's Jefferson Smith in a lab coat -- who is thoroughly invested in the promise of America. Most of the movie consists of him bravely standing up to dark-suited deniers who suggest if he knows what's good for him he ought to just go along.

Now, as far as I know, Omalu did romance and marry a similarly upstanding Kenyan nurse (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) given to saying stilted things to him like, "I can't tell what you're afraid of: what you'll find or what you won't."

But Concussion could have been a lot more.

Director Peter Landesman had a fine record as an investigative reporter before he began directing films, and there are -- particularly in early scenes that limn the tragedies of former Pittsburgh Steeler players Mike Webster (David Morse, in convincing makeup) and Justin Strzelczyk (former NFL lineman Matt Willig) -- signs of that seeping into the screenplay. But there are also a few dramatic overstatements: Landesman includes a bit about a mysterious car following Omalu's wife, and he suggests -- without presenting any real foundation -- that the NFL may have been behind an FBI raid on the office of his mentor, the high-profile forensic pathologist and politician Cyril Wecht (Albert Brooks).

(Wecht is a fascinating figure who, as an "expert" on celebrity deaths, has been in and out of the spotlight since the mid-1960s. He probably deserves his own movie; and if one's made Brooks would be a good choice to play him. He was prosecuted for using his office for private gain -- a case that was eventually dismissed. If Landesman really suspects the NFL was behind the raid on his office, it would have been nice if he'd delved a little deeper into that theory.)

What Landesman should have gone after here is the cover-up. The NFL apparently knew for years that repetitive head trauma could lead to problems for players after their retirement from football. Concussion barely alludes to this, choosing instead to stay with Omalu as he repeatedly faces up to men who tell him he doesn't know what he's messing with. There's a particularly ugly moment when he's confronted by former Steelers safety turned NFL Yes Man Dave Duerson (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), who tells him, "Go back to Africa." Duerson is also depicted as callously dismissing Andre "Dirty" Waters (Richard T. Jones), a hard-hitting safety who was found to have CTE after his 2006 suicide, with the line, "Got a headache? See a doctor."

Duerson himself committed suicide five years later, shooting himself in the chest and leaving a note asking that his brain be examined for CTE. (It was present.) His family has disputed how he's depicted in the film, as the embodiment of the denying NFL, and Landesman has responded that his film is "emotionally and spiritually accurate."

That's weak.

Concussion may work as a showcase for Smith if its aim is to add Golden Globe or Oscar glitter to his trophy case. But it fails as a moral lesson, to the point that it exploits balletic violence in the same way the NFL does -- there's even a scene where violent on-field hits are intercut with shots of articles from medical journals and Smith's furrowed brow, underlined by one of the most heavy-handed James Newton Howard scores in recent memory.

It isn't a terrible movie, it's just exactly the sort of movie you'd expect from Hollywood, a platitudinous and reductive lesson that's too polite and simplistic to engage. But that's not Will Smith's fault.

MovieStyle on 12/25/2015

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