Althea (2014)
Althea Gibson’s life and achievements transcend sports. A truant from the rough streets of Harlem, Althea emerged as a most unlikely queen of the highly segregated tennis world in the 1950s. Her roots as a sharecropper’s daughter, her family’s migration north to Harlem in the 1930s, mentoring from Sugar Ray Robinson, David Dinkins and others, and fame that thrust her unwillingly into the glare of the early Civil Rights movement, all bring her story into a much broader realm of the American story.
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So much average
Sadly Over-hyped
For all the hype it got I was expecting a lot more!
It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.
I very much enjoy the game of tennis, and particularly enjoy its history, especially its progression in the post-war era, through the Civil Rights realm (throughout the world), and now to a gender-equality battles that continue on. That said, I went in to this film thinking 'specialty content,' 'strictly art house,' and 'interesting only to those who would be interested' sort of sub-genre of film. That's not what happened. What emerged, instead, was a portrait of a very complex character, certainly made more complex and challenging by the times, but who would have been a standout for her persona in almost any era. Far more than a mere 'sports film,' in other words, and with a poignant and very bittersweet ending. A final plug: the film has some very interesting narrators who guide you through the times, the contexts in which Gibson developed her tennis skills, and certainly the way she adapted around the times, which never fully embraced her unique blend of renegade posture and stance with her very keen awareness of how to play to her audience. The narrators become friends almost, not merely recounting how Gibson did this or that but the sometimes tortured way she processed the world around here. A wonderful movie experience in the sense that it fully surprised me and delivered far more than I had calculated it could.