At one point in “Concussion” you hear a doctor tell another that common sense led him to believe head trauma associated with football caused brain injuries, resulting in early deaths of its players.
Common sense also tells movie goers that a film based on a hot, current, moving-target of a topic should be questioned at every turn for veracity … or just taken for pure entertainment. This is especially true when so many scientific and legal aspects are in play. (See the documentary, “League of Denial” for something closer to the entire truth.)
Science isn’t as simple as publishing some findings, gathering three case studies and then, voila, you win, because you’ve achieved a medical breakthrough. Neither is making a movie “based on a true story” that isn’t over yet.
The former is especially so when what you’ve discovered is inconvenient and probably very costly for a powerhouse like the NFL, and the accompanying culture of American football. As Albert Brooks’ Dr. Cyril Wecht so aptly says, it “owns a day of the week, the same day the church used to own.”
While many of the minor details are questionable or inaccurate (for example, there’s no record of Dave Duerson and Andre Waters arguing with each other before their separate suicides), the gist of the film as it relates to the NFL is: The league tried to discredit a legitimate doctor’s legitimate findings and muddy things up in public opinion by falling back on its own laughable version of science.
Will Smith’s character, Dr. Bennet Omalu, barks at an NFL doctor to “tell the truth.” Which, as we noted, the movie doesn’t always do.
But the real punch line is the league had produced its own version of the facts for so long. And in the interest of protecting the shield, tried to get the rest of the country to laugh off what it sold as attention-seeking by a quack from Nigeria.
Omalu, a brilliant but naive Pittsburgh coroner, learns of the NFL’s power the hard way when it tried to discredit his discovery of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE), the disease caused by the repeated concussions.
And, as in the film, Omalu really did mistakenly think the NFL would thank him for helping to make its game safer.
That’s an indicator of why this movie is actually less about the brain’s inability to withstand the demands of football and more about frailty of the American Dream in its many different forms.
The players portrayed achieve ultimate success measured in Super Bowl rings. But they lose their minds, families and eventually lives as a result.
Omalu is an immigrant on a steady path to the good life in the country of limitless opportunity. Then Mike Webster’s body shows up on his autopsy table, and he makes the discovery he thinks will help save the game about which he knows next to nothing. Instead, his life is nearly ruined, too.
“Concussion” is an entertaining story if you keep in mind the concept of poetic license. It got the important parts right, and it’s not going to kill football with its version of how the game was forced to stop killing its players.
Reach Dave Reardon at dreardon@staradvertiser.com or 529-4783. His blog is at Hawaiiwarriorworld.com/quick-reads.
