Murderball

I really liked Murderball. I also enjoyed watching Dogtown and Z-Boys and Touching the Void. So when I read Ian McDonald’s article (Available here: files.me.com/tylerjhicks/ldqasx), Situating the Sport Documentary, for the first time, I had a hard time understanding his argument. Intriguing stories, interesting characters, and narrative-style construction are watchable and entertaining, as the growing audiences for documentaries in the post “Michael Moore moment” have shown. More people are experiencing a type of film they may not have had as much exposure to, something I view as a generally “good” thing. It was not until I read through McDonald’s piece carefully for a second time that I realized what he was actually getting at in the third section of his article.

McDonald argues that documentary (specifically sport documentary) has moved into a phase in which narrative, fiction-style storytelling is often lauded over films that are more careful to focus on the context in which their subject is taking place, both politically and societally. It is not so much that one style is “better” than another as it is that the pre-Moore era films McDonald addresses focus on larger issues of concern than do the micro-focused human interest stories often told in post-Moore era sport documentary.

These concepts and McDonald’s argument definitely informed my viewing and reaction to Murderball as I continued to think about the film well after having seen it. McDonald classifies the film as a participatory documentary, and this is certainly evident throughout. From the “line up” shots of each different country’s team near the beginning of the film to the presence of the camera in the school and at the performance of Joe Soares’ son, it is clear the director of the film is carefully composing shots and controlling the environment in many parts of the film.

Murderball has an overwhelmingly strong narrative pattern, similar to those often seen in fiction films. The audience meets the characters, we meet the protagonist/s (largely seen here as Zupan and his teammates), the antagonist (Soares, although it could be argued that these roles are reversible depending on how you view the film), and are set up with a clear problem which eventually results in a climax (the Athens Paralympic Games) and resolution (a star is made of Zupan, Soares begins to learn what is truly important in his life). It’s a tremendous story; one that grabs the audience from the first shots of crashing wheelchairs, keeps them hooked with revelations about quadriplegic sex, and finishes strongly with a conclusion that is emotional and riveting on many levels.

What Murderball doesn’t do is say a whole lot about any bigger, more serious issues of politics, world, or national affairs. This is not to say that the film is only about quad rugby and not about issues of disability, masculinity and the concerns that go along with them - it certainly is. Rather, McDonald would argue that it lacks a current social context or larger discussion to relate to, one that would magnify the events we see on screen to an even greater level of importance. Murderball may capture the real, but it does so in a constructed, story-driven manner that may ultimately say more about what the director is trying to say with the film (which to me seems to be an appropriate use of the documentary medium) than about what it means to play wheelchair rugby as a disabled athlete.