Wimbledon   
 

Lizzie Bradbury: Kirsten Dunst

Peter Colt: Paul Bettany

Dennis Bradbury: Sam Neill

Dieter Prohl: Nikolaj Coster-Waldau

Ron Roth: Jon Favreau

 

Directed by Richard Loncraine

  Written by Adam Brooks and

Jennifer Flackett & Mark Levin
For a sports fan like me, any movie that uses a sport as its background is setting itself up for failure.  I'm not going to be able to suspend all belief and embrace the fact that a high school football coach can get "fired" in the middle of the game by his players who then go on to win after an inspiring speech from the quarterback with a horrible Texas accent.  Or the fact that you can hit a walk-off home run in the top of the ninth.  It was hard enough to watch Shoeless Joe Jackson bat right-handed.

A movie has to do so many things right to begin with, why take on the added burden of replicating athletic feats?  Needless to say, Wimbledon does a pretty good job of convincingly showing its actors playing tennis.  An audience is able to focus in on the main story of the film because the action was not of the sort that sidetracks you due to its implausibility.  And Wimbledon has a pretty good story to tell. 

Peter Colt (Paul Bettany) is an aging British tennis player who has decided that this Wimbledon will be his last tournament.  A solid, but not spectacular, player in the past, Colt has now practically disappeared from the radar as young stars garner all of the attention.

Lizzie Bradbury (Kirsten Dunst) is the young American upstart whose intensity on the court has not made her many friends, but has contributed greatly to her success.

A romance between these two blooms as Colt makes an improbable run for the championship.  The love between the two affects their games in different ways, which naturally leads to problems that the new couple must face and deal with.

One problem is Lizzie's dad, played by Sam Neill.  He wants his daughter to remain focused on the tournament and feels that any relationship will cause his daughter to become distracted from her main goals.  And while he has a point, Lizzie must ultimately decide what is more important to her. 

The role of Lizzie's dad is an encouraging one in this movie.  He could have easily been written as the evil barrier between his daughter and Peter, but there is nothing sinister in his actions.  Sometimes fathers can stand in the way of their daughter's wishes despite the best intentions, and that appears to be the case here.  It's refreshing to not have that unbelievably evil character in the film that the protagonists must eventually overcome.  Instead, the pitfalls faced by Lizzie and Peter are typical of any new relationship, which make the film both authentic and interesting.

When it comes down to it, a romantic comedy can only go as far as the lead characters take it.  If there is no chemistry, then there isn't much of a movie.  Wimbledon works well because Dunst and Bettany do have a good chemistry together.  It also works because of the British flavor.  There's something about the addition of dry British humor that keeps a romantic comedy from becoming too syrupy.  I think that's part of the reason behind the success of films like Notting Hill or Love, Actually, and Wimbledon follows in their footsteps by using the right touches of comedy, drama, and romance to produce a satisfying film.