Flak Magazine: Review of Wimbledon, 10.01.04

Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner's production shingle, Working Title, makes better movies than most, but most of their movies are better than their latest, Wimbledon. Particularly when looking at the past 10 years of British romance/relationship pictures, Working Title hit the mother lode: Four Weddings and a Funeral, Bridget Jones's Diary, About A Boy and Love Actually, to name a few. All of those hits share the irrepressibly foppish Hugh Grant, and Grant had right of first refusal on the role of Peter Colt, an underdog Briton racqueteer who becomes enamored of Lizzie Bradbury, an American hotshot. Grant and, allegedly, Reese Witherspoon declined these roles, and hopes for another bankable star vehicle in Working Title's best tradition slipped away.

In its place is a strange romance featuring Paul Bettany (Master & Commander, A Beautiful Mind) and Kirsten Dunst. Even if you disregard the fact that she's a 22-year-old phenom and he's a 33-year-old retiree-to-be, you're still stopped short of buy-in because, at every point, it is obvious that this is Kirsten Dunst, not Lizzie Bradbury. A Martina Hingis-type making a splash at her first Wimbledon as a top-ranked ladies' player, Lizzie is within a standard deviation of the Dunst Value Meal. She cocks off to the umpire and assassinates her foes in the press, like most good American tennis princesses, and her dad (Sam Neill) bears down on her like a WASPy Richard Williams.

Dunst's acting style of sleepy-eyed, halting recitation may have reached its point of diminishing returns. Prior to Wimbledon, it wasn't obvious that Dunst was a poor performer. She managed to surround herself with overactors (going backward, Tobey Maguire, James Franco, Julia Stiles, Michelle Williams, Denise Richards) with far more blood on their hands. In the Spider-Man films, she read her lines like they were written across her scene partner's face, but the tougher viewer task was to tolerate both Franco (pensive, yet posh) and Maguire (wimpy, yet willed). Faced with this challenge, it's far easier to give in and accept her on merit of her Billy-Corgan's-little-sister beauty. In Mona Lisa Smile, she was aligned with Stiles, who outduels even Dunst in stiltedness. (The two of them could wrestle any text-to-speech applet to the mat.)

In Wimbledon, though, she has no such twentysomething peer to cover for her. She's acting in league with Bettany, Neill and Bernard Hill. Suddenly, the limits of her emotional range are readily apparent. Even in the fierce cauldron of the sports arena and on the hotplate of romance, she keeps heading back to the middle, where her dialogue sounds roughly as uninflected as a library conversation. Dunst is given lines to be gracious, romantic, betrayed, commanding, aloof, alienated, satisfied — the full buffet, as far as romantic comedies go. If you think that she succeeds at any one of these in Wimbledon, take a look at your ticket stub to be sure you weren't at the wrong movie.

Dunst doesn't apply acting as a set of decisions on how to portray a character; she applies acting as a means of repackaging herself. Many actresses have forged good careers from playing iterations of themself (Julia Roberts, Sandra Bullock, et al), but it doesn't work for Dunst here. She's playing an athlete with a precise need for court vision, but in Wimbledon, she's always striking the same eyes-at-half-mast pose that Mary Jane models in that Spider-Man 2 billboard; it undermines any belief that Lizzie is such a pistol. An actress with such a fatigued veneer does little to excite the viewer. Delroy Lindo, Nicole Kidman, Mel Gibson, Wimbledon's own Hill … these are the idols Dunst needs to consult to turn this thing around.

The interactive effect of these deficincies is almost criminal; Dunst takes every echo of thunder away from Bettany, who does very well to fill Grant's shoes. Unlike many other Working Title successes, Wimbledon doesn't bear the benefit of Richard Curtis' rat-a-tat Brit-wit patter; the mode of administration here is inner dialogue and modest jabs, both of which are in Bettany's wheelhouse. His Wimbledon has the feel of a slower, quieter comedy, and he guides the viewer through it with comfort.

Much can be said about the film's authenticity, about how it was filmed then and there during Wimbledon 2003. More words can be put toward another sports movie taking its protagonist to the threshold of victory and pushing through. But none of that allays the pesky matter of Kirsten Dunst and her project-sinking performance. What was it that advanced her past the likes of Scarlett Johansson, Sarah Michelle Gellar or Katie Holmes into a position like this? Was it the fact that she hitches her wagon to lower stars, that she plays in more minor leagues so that her limited talent looks championship-caliber? If so, it's time to lay out the field of young American actresses and reseed.

— Andy Stilp (andy.stilp at gmail dot com)