Forced and Erroneous: 16 Notes on the 16-Year-Old Movie "Wimbledon"

Last night, as I contemplated falling asleep, I instead stumbled upon the movie Wimbledon. Then I woke up and wrote the following, which I believe constitutes the most time anyone has spent thinking about Wimbledon since it came out sixteen years ago.

Spoiler alert: In the text below, I discuss many “plot points” from the “film” Wimbledon.

1. The meet-cute in the 2004 romantic comedy Wimbledon happens the day before Wimbledon begins, when our male lead, the never-quite-made-it-big British tennis player Peter Colt (Paul Bettany), is assigned the wrong hotel room, and accidentally walks in on rising American tennis star Lizzie Bradbury (Kirsten Dunst) while she is the shower. Lizzie is surprisingly chill about this situation—she never for a second seems even vaguely surprised or worried. I get that the screenwriters are trying to suggest that she’s cool as a cucumber and doesn’t have hang-ups about her body or whatever, and later it’s revealed that she knows who Peter is because she’s seen one of his matches. But I have to think that even a super-sex-positive, tennis-aware woman with icewater in her veins is going to display at least a moment’s shock when a tall male stranger walks into her hotel room. Regardless, the audience reaction to a meet-cute probably shouldn’t be “why the hell isn’t this woman calling security?”

2. Lizzie Bradbury would be a much better name for a girl detective than a women’s tennis player. 

3. A young Jaime Lannister appears in the movie in the “wisecracking buddy” role. He’s supposed to be German, but I initially thought he was trying and failing to sound Irish. Just let the man be pretty and English—that’s why God put him on the Earth.  

4. Any sports movie is going to face the problem that Hollywood actors aren’t actually built like athletes, but sometimes it’s at least plausible—Kevin Costner as a minor-league catcher; Denzel Washington as a aging playground hoops legend; Geena Davis as a line-drive hitter—these are concepts you can believe if you squint. As for Wimbledon...yeesh. Paul Bettany is tall, so that’s good, but he’s more than a little doughy if you mentally compare him to Rafa Nadal. And Dunst, God love her, was far too much the ingénue circa 2004 to be believable as an elite athlete, particularly in a sport that requires the raw explosiveness of 21st-century tennis.

5. And then there’s the problem of Dunst’s tennis form, which is terrible. During the tournament montages, they mostly mask this problem with clever editing, but there’s a scene where Dunst and Bettany play flirtatious pantomime tennis in the park, and when she fake-serves it looks like the Elaine Benes dance from Seinfeld.  

6. There’s a whole plotline about how we know that Peter is a good guy because he looks worried when ballboys get hit by errant serves. That seems a low bar to clear.

7. Peter and Lizzie spend a lot of time driving around England on picturesque dates. To be clear, they are doing this in the middle of the Wimbledon tournament. I know that players have off days, but I really doubt that Roger Federer is taking romantic strolls through the countryside the day before the quarterfinals.

8. In real life, ten out of the eleven tournaments staged between 2000 and 2010 featured at least one Williams sister in the Wimbledon final. On four occasions Venus and Serena played each other in the final round, including the two years immediately before this film came out. I bring this up because I cannot recall a single black person appearing in the movie Wimbledon.

9. It’s a romantic comedy, so there is of course an airport scene early in the third act (Lizzie and her father are flying home while Peter plays in the men’s final). Bear in mind that this is an airport scene in 2004, depicting two people waiting to board an international flight from Europe to the US. Now consider that Lizzie and her father just straight-up abandon their bags in the terminal. I was genuinely more interested in knowing how long Heathrow got shut down for the bomb-sniffing dogs than I was in who won the match, but alas, my questions were never addressed.

10. Late in the second act, Lizzie tells Peter that she does not want to continue seeing him because tennis needs to be her first priority. After some hijinks involving trellis-climbing, he breaks into her apartment the night before a big match and she seems...surprisingly okay with it. Being down with having her privacy violated appears to be a core trait of Lizzie Bradbury’s character. Anyway, the next day she plays badly and gets knocked out of the tournament, at which point she breaks things off with Peter and leaves town. Later, Peter gives her a big public apology, but the apology is quite vague, and it could easily be read as him apologizing not for breaking into her apartment, but for rocking her world so thoroughly that it made her bad at tennis.

11. Indeed, to that last point, the question of how sex the night before a match impacts one’s tennis performance is discussed frequently in the movie. The film suggests emphatically that sex makes men better at tennis, but it makes women worse.

12. At least that’s its opinion regarding hetero relationships. The film has gay and lesbian characters, but they are all queer quippy sexless sidekicks of the sort that future film historians will be led to believe were omnipresent from 1998 to 2005.

13. Peter wins the Wimbledon final. His opponent is portrayed as a bad guy, though his bad guy bona fides are that he is cocky, he is slightly less concerned than Peter is when ballboys get hit in the face, and he makes a pass at Lizzie at one point (though unlike Peter he stops pursuing her when she says she’s not interested). He also has really good hair. He is, to put it mildly, a poorly realized villain.

14. I would not have guessed at the time that the actor in Wimbledon who would have the most Hollywood success over the next sixteen years would be Jon Favreau. But then, who could have foreseen Baby Yoda? I also don’t think I would have guessed that Kirsten Dunst would end up engaged to Landry from Friday Night Lights. Crucifictorious forever!

15. Both our leads have “wacky families.” There is the inevitable wisecracking sibling, and an overprotective yet wise father. Also, Peter’s parents are in the middle of a madcap marital dispute that has led to Peter’s father living in a treehouse—that’s like ten percent of the film. The movie would have been much better if most of the family stuff had been removed, in no small part because then it only would have been about forty minutes long.

16. The sports movie/rom-com hybrid is truly a mutant hellbeast, combining as it does two of the most formulaic movie genres. Bull Durham is the only example I can think of that is especially good. So is Wimbledon more successful as a rom-com or sports movie? It’s honestly a tough call. What it has to say about romance is more offensive, but the way it imagines sports is considerably dumber. Guess we’ll just have to score it a deuce.