In 1936, the great African-American athlete Jesse Owens won four gold medals at the Olympics held in Berlin, Germany. The new movie Race, a biopic about that time, shows the obvious, but ignores the rest of Owen's story.
One of the ironies of the life of Jesse Owens is that the iconic images of this man were taken by Leni Riefenstahl, filming the 1936 Berlin Olympics for the Nazis. Riefenstahl photographed sports better than anyone and her cameras mounted on tracks parallel the runners and catch Owens with his odd upright style in all three of the races he won – the 100 and 200 meter sprints and the 400 meter relay—along with his astounding final leap in the long jump, for the fourth gold medal.
But there’s another, less famous, shot of Owens in Riefenstahl’s film -- a full figure portrait of Owens just standing near the track. He looks a bit shy and self-conscious. The image holds on screen for just a couple of seconds, but Owens looks like the most beautiful human being on earth. Besides her gnarly connections to the Nazis, the infamous Riefenstahl was also a brilliant cinematic mythologizer, in elegant black and white. She loved bodies; she loved male bodies, and she seems to have loved black male bodies in particular. Her film Olympia infuses the Berlin Olympics with the mantle of ancient Greece and the gods on Olympus. Jesse Owens, for Riefenstahl, is like Zeus or Apollo.
With these images in mind, Stephen Hoskins’ Race, a nostalgic sepia-tinged color biopic about Jesse Owens, has to be a letdown. Played by Stephan James, Owens is good-looking and feisty. As the title indicates, Owens confronted bigotry and segregation throughout the years shown in the movie, and he didn’t knuckle under easily. When the picture finally gets to Owens at the Olympics, there’s tension and then thrilling victories. Owens was not scheduled to run in the relay, but as the film shows, when Avery Brundage, head of the U.S. Olympic Committee, made a shady deal with the Nazis to keep two Jewish runners – Marty Glickman and Sam Stoller – out of the race, Owens stood up for them. And the movie shows the thrilling competition in the long jump, which Owens won because his German rival, Carl Long, helped him with his takeoff.
But nostalgia is limiting, and Race doesn’t have the complexity of mind that the story of Jesse Owens needs. Race ends just after the Olympics, with a moment of low-key racism that’s too weak to undercut the glow of triumph from Owens’ great Olympic victories. But the actual Jesse Owens lived until 1980, and not in victory mode. At the time, track and field athletes could not compete unless they kept their amateur status. Because of a minor incident involving Owens’ independence, his amateur status was yanked, which meant no more glories in track and field. He became a sideshow attraction. He ran against racehorses; he worked in a gas station; he had a dry cleaning business.
The movie Race is happy to show Owens standing up to American racism while he blows away his competition on the track – he once set three world records in a single college track meet. But the movie avoids those 44 years after the Olympics when Jesse Owens did not look like Apollo or Zeus, and he was not doing things that look heroic in a biopic. His life still had meaning, though.
Like the boxer Joe Lewis, Jesse Owens eventually got into tax trouble with the IRS, and the movie might wonder about the government taking aim at black men who dared to be great and powerful. For helping Owens, that German jumper Carl Long was sent into the infantry and he died fighting in Italy. Race could have noticed that in a way both men were punished by their governments, and that comparison could have put some starch and complexity into this too-comfortable movie.
The film ends long before the story does, and I think that leaving Owens at a high point doesn’t fill us with the spirit of optimism; it lets us off the hook.
