On The First Two Episodes Of Winning Time.
My eyebrows were raised at the visual vocabulary Adam McKay decided to go with in Winning Time. And — mind you — I’m typing this note one minute and seventeen seconds into episode one. And I don’t mean to have ‘alarm’ be a byword for ‘offended’ here — as if there’s something transgressive in this opening minute (there isn’t) — but rather to say that the visual signals here are so loud. A U.S World News and Report with Saddam Hussein on the cover. A young kid playing Game Boy. A certain daytime talk show. A watercolor painting of a tired Joe Namath looking down. You couldn’t pretend you weren’t in a certain place even if you tried.
And that wrinkles the brain. We can surely guess that we occupy a certain time or place without a visual logline hammering us again and again, so why do we decide to do the storytelling equivalent of — “It’s 1991. Hey, it’s 1991. Did you hear? It’s 1991. And we’re doing all the cool 1991 things.”
It makes itself just as explicit when it later shows us the accoutrement lining Kareem’s life, too — “Hey, look at this copy of the Quran. Do you know what that makes Kareem? Hey — look at these free jazz records playing. Do you know what this makes Kareem?” And, sure, there’s a bit where the show itself calls out the coded (and not so coded) language used to describe Magic and Bird … but why pretend to have knowledge of ‘what’s really happening’ with the dynamics of the NBA only to undermine those dynamics with elements of visual vocabulary that are just as blunt and repetitive?
Two other things stand out to me about the show so far: John C. Reilly and Jason Clarke’s depiction of Jerry West.
I think I love John C. Reilly’s portrayal of Jerry Buss. I love the potential of this kind of overconfident narrator. Also love the touch of Reilly cutting a deck of cards in such a way as to indicate self-dealing — or, at least, an awareness of the cards he’s holding. And that’s not an exaggeration: if you cut the deck the way Reilly-as-Buss cuts it in the show — cupped in the palm of one hand, the thumb doing the work — it means that you can at least get a peak at the cards you have. (Though this again starts to bring us back to our opening point.)
The portrayal of Jerry West’s morose spirit and volcanic anger made me laugh as well. For a bit. Then it didn’t. What emerged as the laughter died down was a somewhat traditional representation of depression and traditional brushstrokes of a difficult childhood — which was strange only because of how it was balanced amongst the patchwork meta-textuality of Reilly narrating the story of the Lakers to the camera. (And there seems to be no unifying theory of meta-textuality here either — like, why do we have to recreate Airplane? What does that tell us about the story of the Lakers? Or West?)
But don’t take this note as a blanket denunciation — there is a story here. You can see the shape of the story in something like Be Holding by Ross Gay. You can see it when you go out to the court or when you read Love & Basketball. There’s a story here. And bless anyone who’s doing any creative work anywhere.
At the end of the day, someone’s going to tell the story. One way or another.