One element is clearly missing from Peter Landesman’s Concussion: concussions.
Landesman’s earnest biopic about the neuropathologist who diagnosed traumatic brain injuries in NFL players and fought an uphill climb to expose them is, like Friday Night Lights, a football movie that is critical of football. But by never taking its cameras onto the gridiron and aurally pummeling us with the crunching onomatopoeia of pigskin combat, Landesman cossets us from the gravity of the movie’s message. He settles instead for stock video of helmeted heads colliding on the field, lazily juxtaposed with a tranquil score.
That most of us know, from TV and other movies, what concussions sound like is beside the point, which is that this timid David vs. Goliath story expends every effort to downplay anything remotely rough around the edges. Even in the moment when its dignified, Christ-like, frequently spat-upon hero finally takes out his repressed anger on the wall of his house, Landesman tempers the rage with more tinkly music. He protects us once again from violent emotions of the real world, lest anything interfere with the film’s twin tones of inspirational pabulum and righteous sermonizing.
Just about everything about this movie’s approach is wrongheaded, but at least we buy the unlikely casting coup of Will Smith as Dr. Bennet Omalu. The actor looks about 15 years younger than he is, shedding any semblance of American mannerisms to play the monastic Nigerian pathologist, who lives for God and medicine and betrays little comprehension of football, television, nightclubs or courtship rituals. Smith has been typecast for his natural suavity and cocksure swagger for so many years that his work in Concussion is forever disarming in its sober conservatism.
His character, whom we first see plying his trade as an unorthodox coroner in Pittsburgh circa 2002 — he talks to the corpses, and such — discovers his cause after the unexpected death, at age 50, of Mike Webster (David Morse), the retired Steelers center whose last days were marked by debilitating dementia. Ignoring advice to leave the autopsy alone, Omalu orders an expensive full-brain dissection, on his own dime, to decipher why a seemingly healthy athlete would suddenly find himself the mental equivalent of an Alzheimer’s sufferer.
One football-related death leads to another, enough for Omalu to identify the condition as CTE, or chronic traumatic encephalopathy. His revelations, initially published in a medical journal and later picked up by mainstream media outlets, send shock waves through the NFL, whose cardboard-villain representatives, like Mafiosi of yore, attempt to silence, suppress, strong-arm and even imprison the crusading doctor.
Based as it is on a 2009 GQ investigative article about Omalu’s quest to unveil the truth, Concussion could have been another Spotlight: a dramatization of an intrepid attempt to expose lies and corruption at the heart of an American institution. As one character succinctly frames the situation, “the NFL owns a day of the week — the same day the church used to own.”
But Landesman’s script lacks the docu-naturalism that made Spotlight so convincing. It adopts the didactic tone of a public service announcement, taking its audience by the hand rather than throwing us into the proverbial huddle.
This is never more obvious than the featureless role of Prema Mutiso (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), a former registered nurse and Kenyan refugee who has immigrated to the U.S. and becomes Omalu’s love interest. She exists in this story only to dutifully assuage her husband’s doubts, speaking almost exclusively in platitudes and movie-trailer sound bites such as “I can’t tell what you’re more afraid of — what you’ll find, or what you won’t” and “If you won’t speak for the dead, who will?”
Omalu also receives words of encouragement from Julian Bailes (Alec Baldwin), a former Steelers team physician who brings an insider’s knowledge to Omalu’s battle. The problem here, though, is one of performance rather than character. The usually reliable Baldwin’s work here is Razzie-worthy. He never seems to decide whether his doc is supposed to have a Southern accent, but we bear witness to his fruitless negotiations from his first frame to his last.
The film’s only saving grace, aside from Smith’s sincere lead, is Albert Brooks, who looks astonishingly ancient as Omalu’s compassionate boss Cyril Wecht. But the actor has lost none of his trademark comic timing. His quips and retorts subvert, for brief moments, the movie’s sledgehammer sanctimony. With a script that is otherwise so witless, your only conclusion is that he must have ad-libbed them.
CONCUSSION. Director: Peter Landesman; Cast: Will Smith, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Alec Baldwin, Albert Brooks, David Morse, Paul Reiser, Luke Wilson; Distributor: Columbia; Rating: PG-13; Opened Christmas Day in most area theaters