CIFF: “Playing Through” - Film Review
If The Queen’s Gambit proved anything, it’s that even the dullest (sorry) of activities can be made thrilling, even if the audience has no prior emotional investment in the activity. Golf is another one of those activities that you have to love to enjoy. Harry Leon Wilson (not Mark Twain, even though he usually gets the credit) called the sport “a good walk spoiled.” Golf is a central focus in Playing Through, but the film is really about the true experience of Ann Gregory (Andia Winslow). It forces audiences to look at a time not so far removed from the present and learn of the vitriol she faced simply because she wanted to golf.
The bulk of the film is a showdown between Gregory and Babs Whatling (Julia Rae), a white woman called “The Great White Hope” of golf. They’re playing in the U.S. Women’s Amateur tournament at Congressional Country Club, and the stakes for both are high, although Gregory’s are significantly higher. As is the burden for every trailblazer in a field that is adamantly trying to justify its exclusionary practices, Gregory is playing for much more than herself. It’s a burden she shouldn’t have to bear, but one she perfectly sums up at the end of the film. When asked her thoughts about having changed the world, she answers, “I just wanted to play championship golf and I guess that means I had to change the world to do so.”
Playing Through follows the same conventions of most inspirational sports biopics. There are the highs and lows of life as told through the course of one monumental game. While the film tries to break tradition by including a series of flashbacks to explain how Gregory and Whatling arrive at this point in their lives, these scenes ultimately muddle the timeline and don’t add much to the overall message. And that message is very heavy-handed. Playing Through wants to drive home the point that the racism Gregory faces in simply trying to play a sport she loves is unjustifiable and wrong. To do so, the script makes its villains almost cartoonish in their over-exaggerated nature. They never feel like fully realized characters and instead sound like empty mouthpieces for hatred.
Sometimes, when trying to tell a story about the depth of racism and discrimination, a film can rely too much on traumatic moments. Some argue that scenes of trauma are unnecessary because they exploit the empathy of the audience without forcing them to think about the actions being taken. A better option is seen in Get Out, with the slow burn of the family’s deep-seated racism. Some audience members won’t pick up on the microaggressions at the beginning of the film, when the white family is still identified as liberal. However, once the family’s true nature is revealed, the audience is forced to notice how harmful these microaggressions were. This is a better teaching experience than cartoonish examples of racists.
Watching Chevalier and Playing Through one after the other, I’m once again forced to question whether this film was the best way to tell the story of a Black person lost to history. Perhaps it feels more egregious when it’s a person of color because there are a million biopics about white people that are equally filled with exaggerations of the truth. When the subject of one of these movies is a person of color or someone from an underrepresented minority whose story was excluded from history books, the audience likely doesn’t know as much about the person. There’s a greater disappointment when one goes home and does some cursory research about the film’s subjects, only to learn that much of what was presented was exaggerated or untrue.
Playing Through was written by the son of the woman who played against Gregory in this tournament, but her name wasn’t Babs. It explains why the character of Babs was given so much screen time and why she was one of the few white people who treated Gregory with kindness even if the same cannot be said about the real woman. In a piece with Golf.com, the interviewer notes that the real-life Babs likely believed in “separate, but unequal.” So why split Playing Through’s story with this woman? Even without knowing that Babs is fictitious, her storyline pales in comparison to that of Gregory. There are plenty of movies about white housewives in the 1950s who figure out their husbands are holding them back from living their lives, but there’s only one movie (so far) about Ann Gregory. It’s a shame she was forced to share it.
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