Concussion

We’re back at “Black History Movie Month,” where we will start this month with the 2015 sports movie, “Concussion.”

Released at the time of the NFL playoffs, the movie hopefully gave many serious thoughts about the most popular American sport.

Tom Long said in his review, “Based on a true story, Will Smith plays Dr. Bennet Omalu, a Nigerian-born, hyper-motivated coroner working in Pittsburgh.” He treats the corpses he examines as his patients, carefully trying to determine the reason they died.

One day he’s given the body of a local legend, a former Pittsburgh Steeler and NFL hall-of-famer named Mike Webster, played by David Morse, a man who went from the peaks of success to living in a run-down truck. Omalu notices something uneven with Webster’s bran and, against the objections of a fellow coroner and Steeler fan, played by Mike O’Malley, decides to run some cultured tests, paying for them with his own money.

With the support of his no-nonsense boss, played by Albert Brooks, Omalu determines that Webster suffered a litany of concussions over his career, which eventually led to his irregular, unreasonable behavior. Some animals' skulls come programmed with insulation to protect against hard hits. Human skulls do not have that protection. Omalu comes to find out that so many great football players have had similar problems, and other inexplicable deaths have occurred.

This begins Omalu’s fight, first to be taken seriously by the scientific community (not so hard), then by the NFL (nearly impossible). Helping him along the way is a sympathetic former team doctor for the Steelers, played by Alec Baldwin, and the widows of other NFL players, whose husband’s brains Omalu examines, finding they line up right with Webster’s.

“Concussion” spends too much time on Omalu’s relationship with his future wife, played by Gugu Mbatha-Raw, and could have made its point quicker. Long ended his review by admitting, “But that sobering point is made, even though the film takes care to relish the beauty of football, as well. Beautiful or not, we’re all cheering for something that can kill people.”

I didn’t see this in the theaters, although this was one of the movies, we were thinking about seeing that year. I saw it as a rental from the library. I loved this movie because of how real it depicts what happens to NFL players. This is one of the most common conditions that occurs, and this film does a good job showing that. Smith did a great job at playing the coroner who is trying to prove this to the NFL. It wasn’t easy, but it worked out in the end. Check this out if you haven’t because I think you will love it.

Look out next week when we look at a powerful film about one of the civil rights leader in “Black History Movie Month.”