Review of Concussion (2015) by Kyle H — 26 Dec 2015

CONCUSSION is very likely the most important movie you'll watch this year. During CONCUSSION, for the first time I can remember in recent history, I spent a lot of time cringing against and hoping to avoid violence, instead of reveling in on-screen combat for the sake of "entertainment". No movie since GLADIATOR has commented on the horrors of violence in such a significant way. More importantly, CONCUSSION points the audience to a particular way that entertaining violence has been accepted and integrated into our everyday lives: football. I think that proponents of the sport will find that the movie is very fair. Writer / director Peter Landesman did an excellent job of writing moments that empathize with those who enjoy football and also presents warrants for the need to re-examine our social fascination with it.

The movie is based on the true story of Dr. Bennett Omalu - a scientist and coroner who discovered important information about the dangerous impacts of playing football. Omalu is played by Will Smith, who packs emotional intensity into the character. Smith is multi-leveled, conveying Omalu's humor, confidence, spirituality, insecurities, and terrors in various ways. He is clearly, in my opinion, deserving of an Oscar nomination.

Smith was able to take advantage of an excellent screenplay that was not merely about football, but used football as a vehicle to discuss, in Smith's words, "American values". Everything from racisim, to classism, to credentialism was bound up in the obstacles that beset Omalu. Some critics seem to have interpreted the diverse range of topics addressed and various subplots (particularly the romantic one) as lack of discipline and inattention in Landesman's writing. I, contrarily, believe that the story would have been incomplete without these elements and that the movie never loses its grounding in the central through-line.

The final moments of the movie are the most haunting (a word I use with great care) I have encountered this year. I will vaguely describe what makes these moments so powerful: Omalu ends the movie by telling a sort of ghost story in which he attempts to speak for the dead who could not defend themselves against the accusations of the National Football League. He, along with the audience, realize that, of course, there is only so much one man can do. We, as a country, encourage young men everywhere to participate in a violence that has a likelihood of leaving them with long-term brain damage. We encourage this. And we encourage it from an extremely young age. And this, at least to me, is a more than a little unsettling.