Concussion Review

7 out of 10

Cast:

Will Smith as Dr. Bennet Omalu

Alec Baldwin as Dr. Julian Bailes

Gugu Mbatha-Raw as Prema Mutiso

Albert Brooks as Cyril H. Wecht, MD, JD

Paul Reiser as Dr. Elliot Pellman

Luke Wilson as Roger Goodell

Eddie Marsan as Dr. Steven DeKosky

David Morse as Mike Webster

Mike O’Malley as Daniel Sullivan

Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje as Dave Duerson

Arliss Howard as Dr. Joseph Maroon

Sara Lindsey as Gracie

Bitsie Tulloch as Keana Strzelczyk

Richard T. Jones as Andre Waters

Hill Harper as Christopher Jones

Matt Willig as Justin Strzelczyk

Eme Ikwuakor as Amobi Okoye

Concussion Review:

Rational thinking is not natural to human nature, it requires human beings to ignore their own wants and desires in favor of objective truth. The basis for scientific reasoning then is a willful going against the grain, and good public policy – policy derived from fact – must to some extent accept that fact.

That first and foremost human beings do what they want and will rationalize their wants to make them seem to be in their own self-interest, even if they are patently are not. Wants such as running head first into other human beings at top speed for years and years on end.

The rationalizing which comes later involves ignoring the fact that football players like Mike Webster (Morse) – treated like gods on Earth during the playing days – frequently end their years early amid pain and suffering.

Concussion is at its best when it shows exactly that human cost of the hammering professional football players sustain over their lives. The contrasting introduction of Webster – pitting his induction into the football hall of fame and the darkness of his everyday life – perfectly sets the stakes, both emotional and physical, of Peter Landesman’s (Parkland) overview of the NFL’s resistance to and eventual acceptance of the toll the game takes on its participants.

Initially these deaths are a matter for pity, an unfortunate end to individuals who were ultimately less important for themselves than as part of a larger whole. To change these kinds of problems means to challenge society, to force rational thinking upon it.

If this kind of thinking is the underpinning of civilization, then the process of civilization is the struggle against human nature, which means all stories of this type must start with an individual or small group willing to go against the conventional grain.

In this case that individual is Dr. Bennet Omalu (Smith), a Nigerian forensic pathologist working in Pittsburgh who happens to be given the case of determining Mike Webster’s cause of death. A solitary man who lives for his work, he approaches the case not just as an underdog against society but as an outsider as well, viewing it instead as a problem to be solved without understanding or care for the societal pressures involved with it (and thus without care for how it will be affected by him).

Will Smith is excellent as Omalu, portraying him as a man who has studied life more than lived it. He captures Omalu’s low key personal pride and dignity, which will not allow anyone to look down on his findings or ignore them. It’s here where Concussion’s conservative approach to storytelling lets it down; the film attempts to bring its human and thematic drama together by showing how the push to bring his ideas to the world forces Omalu to extend his own social circle beyond his work.

Which is interesting in and of itself but pales compared with the backlash he faces from the NFL and from the country over his investigation into CTE. Which shouldn’t be surprising (but is) as the path of progress is the fight against its obstruction.

The only reason Omalu is able to make it as far as he does is because he does not have the cultural sensitivity to turn away from the truth, but moreso because he is able to find others such as his boss (Brooks) and a former NFL doctor (Baldwin) who, though they do not like the findings, know that they cannot turn away from them. Baldwin in particular is the film’s other standout and his scenes with Smith are the few where the thematic and personal aspects of the story come together in the form of two men with admittedly little in common beyond their commitment to science and reason as the methods for making decisions.

The problem is the film is not particularly interested in just following a solitary man on his quest into a disease and feels the need to focus on the areas of his personal life which were happening at the same time. The breadth of the film’s reach makes the different experiences – the parts of Omalu’s life involved and not involved with is work — difficult to connect together.

And in the process of doing that not particularly well, it avoids the opportunity to look at why a country or group of people would be so enthralled by any one thing that they would not only ignore but actively push back on the idea that there may be health concerns with the thing they love and try their best to keep it unchanged.

It’s a point which is perfectly set up by the other major thematic focus – the need for civilization to focus on rational thought (as described by science and the scientific method) as the basis for policy, and the way this stands counterpoised to natural inclination. As the scientific establishment slowly but surely rallies behind Omalu’s findings, the rest of the country rallies behind its institutions and a desire not to sully or (worse) change them due to inconvenient facts.

But it’s never really explored; whenever the opportunity comes up, the film instead turns to Omalu’s courtship of a recent immigrant nurse (Mbatha-Raw), leaving the obvious second argument unspoken except in the form a generalized menace. It’s a choice which not only lessens Concussion dramatically but thematically and the film is never able to fully deal with the problem.

That’s unfortunate because what it is saying is important, more important than the process by which it comes to be said, as the filmmakers themselves fall for the desire to do what they want rather than what they should. It is part of the responsibility of the proponents of rational thinking then to make sure arguments for their side work on both the thematic and individual level. This is only path to acceptance and with it progress itself.