Bobby (12A.)
Directed by Ron Scalpello.
Featuring Tina Moore, Stephanie Moore, Roberta Moore, Harry Redknapp, Jonathan Pearce and Sir Geoff Hurst. 97 mins
There's something depressingly English about this documentary about World Cup winning captain Bobby Moore. I can't believe there's another country in the world where a film record of the life of its greatest ever football (no, not that benign clothes donkey Beckham, a man most effective hobbling down the catwalk on his one good foot; Moore could face Pele as an equal) would be such a traumatic, heart wrenching experience. Moore died of bowel cancer aged 51, but there's a tremendous melancholy to almost everything else – that he survived testicular cancer in 1964; the sprawling desert of national underachievement that stretch for miles in all direction from the tower of '66; the emptiness of his post-playing career which saw him reduced to doing the punditry for Capital Gold* and writing a column for the Sunday Sport. And all this misery and tears is compounded by every other sentence that comes out of somebody's mouth being something about how nice and decent he was, a prince among men.
Now eastenders do have fairly broad definitions of what constitutes a proper gent, but you look in vain for any hint of edge or meanness to him. The film has been made with the full participation of his surviving family (two wives, Tina and Stephanie, daughter Roberta) so anything that tarnished the legend would have been brushed over. We learn that he was fond of a night out and suffered from insomnia. The end of his marriage is skimmed through – even as an adulterer he was dignified and honourable. So it could be that this is a whitewash but if it is, it is believable – even playing football he appeared to move with an otherworldly grace through the frenzy and fury around him.
Bobby (which is being pushed as Bo66y in some of the promotional material, a move that I hope will be dropped because it just makes the whole nation look desperate) is a straightforward piece of film making and is also an unashamedly football film. Almost all the talking heads are family or footballers (Ray Winstone and Russell Brand get their foot in their door, but are only allowed two sentences each.) It's about playing football and no longer playing football. The first half is the well worn story of his football career; the second is about his struggle to find a place for himself in the world after he stopped playing. The second half is the better, surprisingly. Any number of people complain about how the FA didn't treat him well, didn't use him as an ambassador, that no chairman gave him a top flight managerial position. There is something in that but maybe more to the point is that all that made him special, that set him apart, didn't translate into other aspects of life. The poignancy of the film is not just that a great man died young and couldn't make a go of the rest of his life, but the way it illustrates the terrible transience of life and fleetingness of our achievement: Bobby Moore was the best of us and even that wasn't enough ultimately.
* Pearce is now a respected BBC commentator, and he makes some of the best and most moving contributions to this film, but back them Capital Gold football coverage made Alan Brazil on Talksport look like Wittgenstein. So much so, when he got the gig doing on Robot Wars, it was wonderered whether he had sufficient class.
Directed by Ron Scalpello.
Featuring Tina Moore, Stephanie Moore, Roberta Moore, Harry Redknapp, Jonathan Pearce and Sir Geoff Hurst. 97 mins
There's something depressingly English about this documentary about World Cup winning captain Bobby Moore. I can't believe there's another country in the world where a film record of the life of its greatest ever football (no, not that benign clothes donkey Beckham, a man most effective hobbling down the catwalk on his one good foot; Moore could face Pele as an equal) would be such a traumatic, heart wrenching experience. Moore died of bowel cancer aged 51, but there's a tremendous melancholy to almost everything else – that he survived testicular cancer in 1964; the sprawling desert of national underachievement that stretch for miles in all direction from the tower of '66; the emptiness of his post-playing career which saw him reduced to doing the punditry for Capital Gold* and writing a column for the Sunday Sport. And all this misery and tears is compounded by every other sentence that comes out of somebody's mouth being something about how nice and decent he was, a prince among men.
Now eastenders do have fairly broad definitions of what constitutes a proper gent, but you look in vain for any hint of edge or meanness to him. The film has been made with the full participation of his surviving family (two wives, Tina and Stephanie, daughter Roberta) so anything that tarnished the legend would have been brushed over. We learn that he was fond of a night out and suffered from insomnia. The end of his marriage is skimmed through – even as an adulterer he was dignified and honourable. So it could be that this is a whitewash but if it is, it is believable – even playing football he appeared to move with an otherworldly grace through the frenzy and fury around him.
Bobby (which is being pushed as Bo66y in some of the promotional material, a move that I hope will be dropped because it just makes the whole nation look desperate) is a straightforward piece of film making and is also an unashamedly football film. Almost all the talking heads are family or footballers (Ray Winstone and Russell Brand get their foot in their door, but are only allowed two sentences each.) It's about playing football and no longer playing football. The first half is the well worn story of his football career; the second is about his struggle to find a place for himself in the world after he stopped playing. The second half is the better, surprisingly. Any number of people complain about how the FA didn't treat him well, didn't use him as an ambassador, that no chairman gave him a top flight managerial position. There is something in that but maybe more to the point is that all that made him special, that set him apart, didn't translate into other aspects of life. The poignancy of the film is not just that a great man died young and couldn't make a go of the rest of his life, but the way it illustrates the terrible transience of life and fleetingness of our achievement: Bobby Moore was the best of us and even that wasn't enough ultimately.
* Pearce is now a respected BBC commentator, and he makes some of the best and most moving contributions to this film, but back them Capital Gold football coverage made Alan Brazil on Talksport look like Wittgenstein. So much so, when he got the gig doing on Robot Wars, it was wonderered whether he had sufficient class.
