Will Smith + Science + Football = A Serious & Entertaining Concussion by Stephane Dunn

Will Smith + Science + Football = A Serious & Entertaining Concussionby Stephane Dunn | @DrStephaneDunn | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
At about four and half, my sports loving, now six year old son began to plead, demand, and beg: Mommy, I want to play flag football? When can I play? I, the sports-loving, sports- watching Mom, steadfastly resisted. He’d tell everybody he was going to play football next while I’d shake my head no over his head. After a year and a half of no flag football, he settled down into sports stats commentating and a threat for me. When I grow up, I’m going to play college football. In Utah [Utah??? I gasped in my head] then I’m going to the NFL.
Avid football watching, former high school baseball player Daddy mostly stayed on the sideline but grumbling louder as time went on. ‘It’s alright if the boy plays’ and comfortingly to our son, ‘you’ll play when you get a little bit older.’  But this was before an advanced screening of Concussion and a conversation following that included ex-NFL players and the brilliant Nigerian American immigrant Dr. Bennet Omalu, the star subject of the film. The grumbling gave way to a prediction and a declaration:  that movie really could be a ‘game changer’ like the official promotion touts. ‘Our son wanna play, he can go out there when he turns eighteen but he won’t be playing on our watch.’ 
A film based on Omalu’s groundbreaking story and Jeanne Marks Laskas’s pivotal 2009 GQ article about his story and the scientific work on concussions, Concussion is written and directed smartly by Peter Landesman. Concussion takes on the now famous but surprisingly still too quietly kept reality of CTE (Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy)–the brain trauma injury phenomenon occurring among football players that Dr. Omalu’s research helped bring to much needed light. Will Smith stars as Dr. Omalu and co-stars, include Alec Baldwin in a meaty role as a former Pittsburgh Steelers’ player’s doctor, Gugu MBatha-Raw [Omalu’s wife], Arliss Howard, David Morse (‘Iron’ Mike Webster), Hill Harper, Albert Brooks, and Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje as Dave Duerson. Concussion faces several major challenges in the jockeying for box office attention–yes, it’s coming out on a coveted holiday spot, Christmas Day, but it’s just a week into the box office shattering release of Star Wars and during a critical high point in the NFL season when play off berths are being decided.
The greatest foe for Concussion is football’s sacred space in the psyche of American culture and its strong appetite for violence and maximum impact in competitive sports. Like Baldwin’s character sums up, the NFL owns a day of the week formerly owned by God. Whew! We know the NFL didn’t welcome concussions becoming a controversial hot topic of focus a few years ago so it’s a given that Concussion is not a film the NFL or college level or professional combat sports money-makers are dying for the American movie public to rush and see, embrace, and widely discuss and debate. 
However, Concussion deserves that very attention; it is both a gripping story that takes on a heavy weight issue and overall gripping filmmaking. It’s a film about science and American masculine cultural identity personified in professional football. Concussion isn’t a sports or football film as much as it is about the economic, psychic, and health implications of a violent American sports culture.
Will Smith does what we haven’t seen in awhile but love to see – stretch those capable acting chops to portray a man he obviously respects and for a story he knows is important. Challenge brings out the best in Smith, something we know from his earliest major dramatic film, Six Degrees of Separation (1993). An older Smith is more comfortable but no less hard working in taking on the challenge. He has the task of imbibing the African sensibility, accent, and persona of Dr. Omalu and subjugating that iconic movie star, cool Will Smith persona; there’s seconds long slippage in these now and again, but Smith’s experience, respect, and study result in a steady, compelling portrayal.   
The story follows the dedicated forensic neuropathologist who, while working as a coroner in Pittsburgh, begins his journey to noble infamy when he performs the autopsy on legendary Pittsburgh Steeler, Iron Mike Webster. The brain, which the real-life Dr. Omalu, views as that most beautiful organ, becomes the central subject of his research as he becomes obsessed with finding out why the fifty year old athlete sunk to such despair that he ended up homeless, gluing his teeth in, and tasering himself to sleep in the raggedy truck he lived in. As the number of Steeler players committing suicide or ending up dead after spiraling out of control climbs, Dr. Omalu’s dogged research helps uncover further evidence of a brain disease associated with repeated blunt force trauma. He’s dismissed as a quack and his scientific expertise ridiculed fueled by racial and national politics because he’s neither a white male or American but rather African. It’s ironic that an African doctor who believes wholeheartedly in the American dream and a white male bourgeois model of American success pursues a mystery that places him at odds with the very heart of American culture.
This is one of the disturbing, perhaps unwitting, layers of the film–Dr. Omalu’s striving towards melting into the pot so to speak  - achieving legitimacy as an American pitted against his dedication to the quest for scientific truth and the foundation of ethical and moral principles that is, I dare say, rooted in his African identity and worldview. Omalu’s sacred regard for the dead people for whom he works on behalf of is stressed in the film. Ultimately, the film romanticizes his American strivings and does not give a sufficient nod to his African culture rootedness. It tries hard to appear un-anti-NFL or American football through reminding us about the beauty and inspirational meaning and value of football to the cities, towns, and football fans and players attached devotedly to it.
Much chatter has been centered around the NFL’s involvement and reaction to the film; there’s a whole backstory about SONY’s concern with upsetting the powerful NFL too much and how much the script was perhaps “softened” to minimize League backlash. How do you tell a story that can’t help but to lead to questions about the shortcomings of the way American football as well as other sports such as boxing, hockey, and others are played? How are the safety measures, regulations, and equipment simply way too inadequate to seriously minimize the long-term impact of violent physical impact sports on players? And what are the shortcomings of that NFL lawsuit settlement brought by 5,000 ex-NFL players?   
Dr. Omalu assures that the NFL did not have any input into the film and further that he didn’t sign off on the film until it was done and for him satisfied the truth about a subject he sees as a “civil and human rights issue.” He’s not incorrect about the gravity of the situation. Millions of youngsters [whom he argues should not play contact sports as children when the brain is still developing] from football towns and families and many from poor, African American communities box and play football as a possible way up and out. African American players make up about 68% of the league’s players and the trend is the same on the college level. Too many parents, would be NFL star fathers and mothers in love with the ideal of raising the next NFL great, make playing a rite of masculine passage and the way to hoped for fame and fortune. A college education has become almost an afterthought, just the necessary step to get there.
The liberal use of the close up, the favored shot in Concussion, isolates detail and represent sophisticated science with striking simplicity–elements film theoretician Bela Belasz long ago attributed to the close up. Beautifully shot by Salvatore Totino and edited with precision by William Goldenberg, Concussion magnifies the painstaking brain research we witness Dr. Omalu pursue over time and with cost intercut at points with shots of player plays on the field that enthrall–the beauty of motion, speed, player athletic prowess, and the shock of bodily impact that keep so many glued in front of the television Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays from late August through Super Bowl Sunday. The close ups mimic the attention to detail demanded by the process of scientific research and convey with painful, unforgiving representation the unraveling of individual players none more graphically portrayed than Morse’s Mike Wesbster when the brain, a free floating organ, is the subject of repeated trauma; Blurred shots heighten the angst, anger, and despair that accompany the science’s emergence into the public and the subsequent resistance to the findings.
Concussion rescues that very word from the sort of popular benign meaning and commonplaceness in which it is still treated with regard to player injury. Five to seven days recovery for a bleeding-in-the-brain kind of injury. It puts the close up on something we don’t glimpse on Monday night or Sunday afternoon – the possible future that awaits the physical and material life of players after playing the sport is over.
Concussion won’t send millions fleeing from their football love easily, but it will necessarily provoke real talk and more mothers and fathers raising would be NFL stars are going to be demanding some more information and research and moms like me are going to exhale and feel free to not apologize for not letting their young sons play football.
ConcussionDirected by Peter LandesmanRelease date: December 25, 2015Running Time: 123 min.
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Writer and professor Stephane Dunn, PhD, is the director of the Cinema, Television, & Emerging Media Studies program at Morehouse College. She teaches film, creative writing, and literature. She is the author of the 2008 book, Baad Bitches & Sassy Supermamas: Black Power Action Films (U of Illinois Press). Follow her on Twitter: @DrStephaneDunn