This replay of the 1973 tennis match between Bobby Riggs and Billie Jean King serves as an ode to the America Donald Trump is killing — and a prayer for its revival.
The two leads’ intros are revealing. Billie Jean appears as a montage of action shots. Her vitality shows her as blur. Riggs paces alone in his high, empty office tower, an ex-champ now a supernumerary for his rich wife’s father. Riggs itches to do something, anything, to recover his lost glory, to reaffirm his superiority as a man.
In his bragging, bluster, vanity, arrogance, misogyny, showmanship, moral emptiness and ultimate futility, Riggs is a Trump figure. To both, anyone afflicted with responsibility, modesty and humanity is a loser. Riggs hijacks a Gamblers Anonymous meeting to nourish their addiction, not to address it. His clowning barely conceals his lack of self-respect and moral core.
Against Riggs’s transparent insecurity and empty macho strut, Billie Jean projects a confident, competent, spirited servant to the public good. She’s an icon of two revolutions in America, which Trump is in the process of reversing. There’s even a “Billie Jean for President” sign at the match, among the still-embarrassing reminders of Nixon.
Her revolt against the male-dominated tennis profession is an assertion of women’s right to equality, in treatment and in salary.
Jack Kramer embodies the male assumption of superiority. The women’s purse should be one twelfth of the men’s even though the women’s games attract equal audiences. Kramer lives by that double standard, flattering women while suppressing them.
Their egos clash when Billie Jean refuses to play the big match if Kramer is Riggs’s commentator on TV. Kramer claims she won’t have the nerve to abandon the match if he performs. She responds in kind: He won’t have the nerve to see it cancelled because of his refusal to step down. She wins that one, then — spoiler alert — the match.
She wins with precisely the qualities Kramer says women lack: physical strength, the ability to perform under pressure, and control over her emotions. Her post-game private weeping shows she has the emotions that ennoble a woman — and the discipline to control them. She also has the stamina and rigour Riggs’s game has lost.
Of course that calumny is what women continue to face in business, politics, academia, wherever the fraternity is too frightened to give women even a taste of the man’s traditional privilege and power. Remember Trump’s mock concern over Hillary’s stamina —then his collapse into a golf cart at his first summit meeting.
In the second revolution, Billie Jean’s first lesbian affair emphasizes her iconic role in liberating sexual identity. As her gay designer consoles her, soon America will let people like them love whom they want to, how they want to. A postscript details her activism for LGBT rights and the close relationship she maintained with her ex-husband throughout her later gay relationship. His swagger dissolved, Riggs is bolstered by the return of his wife too.
The designer’s optimism proved true — for a while, until Trump’s current betrayal of the women and LGBT that as candidate he pledged to support.
As Riggs is portrayed here, he has one appealing quality Trump lacks. Riggs acknowledges his needs. He knows he needs the thrill of gambling, assurance that he’s not just a kept man, his sons’ respect and his wife’s — well, at least her presence. Trump is too childish to have even that self-awareness.
Howard Cosell is another welcome revival in his ABC TV coverage of the match. He too is a reminder of America’s lost glory, when the “mere” sports announcer could abet the social revolution Mohammad Ali embodied in choosing his own name and his own politics. Cosell’s liberalism in pro sports contrasts to Trump’s distortion of the NFL players’ kneeling to protest America’s continuing racism, misrepresenting it as a lack of patriotism.
How will this film play? I think most viewers will enjoy the drama, the humour, the emotional engagement.
But there will remain that radical division between the conflicting views of what exactly made America “great.” Billie Jean’s side will say America was great for promoting equality, liberty, opportunities for all, the right of everyone to realize what they individually are. From the women’s ambitions, independence, presumption, sexual freedom and equality of rights, the Trump side will recoil in fear and disgust. This vision of the States Formerly Known as United is how that 1973 mini-drama reflects and addresses America today. 
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