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    Zendaya, Luca Guadagnino, Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist on ‘Challengers’

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    Can trash talk be a love language?It is in the world of Luca Guadagnino’s new film “Challengers,” which pits two best-friend tennis players, Patrick (Josh O’Connor) and Art (Mike Faist), against each other in a bid to win the heart of the superstar Tashi Duncan (Zendaya). What begins as innocent teasing becomes more charged once an injury cuts short Tashi’s career: Forced to pivot to coaching, she weds Art and goads him to demolish her former lover Patrick on the court, though both men continue to nurse their own hidden agendas.“I find them all really likable and charming — and terrible also,” Zendaya said with a grin. The complicated adult stakes of “Challengers” offer a new pursuit for this 27-year-old actress, who shot to fame as a teenager on the Disney Channel and is now best known for her Emmy-winning role on HBO’s “Euphoria” and the big-budget movie franchises “Spider-Man” and “Dune.” Though she is aware that “Challengers” will test her box-office draw as a solo star, she didn’t overthink her decision to make the movie, which comes out in theaters on Friday.“I wanted to do it because it’s brilliant,” she said. “It’s not like I sat in my room and had this master board: ‘OK, this is how I’m going to make my big transition for my first lead theatrical role.’”Last week at a Beverly Hills hotel, I met Zendaya, her co-stars O’Connor (“The Crown”) and Faist (“West Side Story”), and Guadagnino for an hour of freewheeling conversation about “Challengers” and the pressure of forging a life and career in the public eye. Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.“The triangle is not just two people after one,” Luca Guadagnino, the director of “Challengers,” said, “but the corners touch together all the time.”Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesThis movie poses a lot of questions about ambition and drive. Zendaya, has your relationship to your own ambition changed over time?We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Under the Hollywood Spotlight, a Fading Welsh Town Is Reborn

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      A former industrial hub, Wrexham had long been in decline. Now, it’s reviving as the globally famous star of a reality series about its once forlorn soccer team’s rejuvenation.In the Welsh language, the virtually untranslatable word “hiraeth” (pronounced here-ayeth) describes a blend of nostalgia and longing for a time that can never be recreated.For Wrexham, a working-class town in northern Wales, it was a feeling that came to define a postindustrial malaise that descended in the 1980s as the last remaining coal mines shuttered their rickety gates and, later, the furnaces at the nearby steelworks ran cold.Only the beloved soccer club, Wrexham A.F.C., remained: the oldest team in Wales, a perennial also-ran but still an indomitable source of local pride.“We went through so much as a town,” said Terry Richards, 56, a lifelong fan of the club as he sat at home in the team’s bright scarlet jersey. “Those were difficult times.”Wales has its legends of heroes returning to save the day, but few could have predicted that an unlikely pair of Hollywood actors, Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney, would waltz into town just over two years ago and buy the ailing club. That set off a chain of events that catapulted the town out of the doldrums and into the international spotlight, casting the residents as the main characters in their own Hollywood reality show based around the soccer club, “Welcome to Wrexham.”Few could have predicted that the two famous actors would walk into the town in the first place. But Mr. McElhenney, an American who had binged on sports documentaries during lockdown, conducted an exhaustive search for a down-and-out soccer team with growth potential, landing on Wrexham A.F.C., and persuaded Mr. Reynolds to join him in his pet project.Players from Wrexham A.F.C. practice at the Racecourse Ground while crews from the documentary series “Welcome to Wrexham” film them.Mary Turner for The New York TimesAfter paying the bargain sum of around $2.5 million, they moved into town (the Canadian-born Mr. Reynolds even bought a house) and began overhauling the team’s operation. They revitalized the training facilities and upgraded the roster, offering comparatively enormous salaries that attracted established players from the upper levels of English soccer.Last Saturday, that Hollywood story finally got its very own Hollywood ending — the team’s promotion after its winning season into the English Football League, the next tier of England’s multilevel soccer pyramid, after a 15-year absence. As the referee blew the final whistle, generations of teary-eyed supporters leaped from the stands onto the rain flecked field in joyous celebration.In that moment, a town was reborn, and that lingering “hiraeth” was no more. More

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      ‘Air’ and the Argument for Letting the Talent Share in the Profits

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      The movie’s focus (how Michael Jordan got a cut from Nike) reflects what its filmmakers, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, are trying to do in their new venture.There can only be so much suspense in “Air.” The new drama depicts Nike’s quest in 1984 to sign the then-rookie Michael Jordan to an endorsement deal, and everyone knows that in the end, Nike will get its man. Some viewers are doubtlessly wearing Swoosh-adorned Air Jordan sneakers.Yet the filmmakers conjure a gripping moment late in the film. Through wit and grit, Sonny Vaccaro, the Nike executive played by Matt Damon, has secured Jordan’s agreement — until Jordan’s mother, Deloris Jordan (Viola Davis), makes an additional demand: Her son must receive not only a $250,000 fee, but also a cut from every sneaker sold.“A shoe is just a shoe,” she tells Vaccaro, “until my son steps into it.”This seemingly small nuance, more than just a plot development, embodies one of the central themes of “Air”: the value a talented individual brings to a business and the importance of compensating him for what he is worth.“He created that value,” Damon, also a producer, said in an interview. “Yeah, they had some great advertising campaigns, right? But Michael Jordan going out and being the best player every single night is what put the meaning in the shoe.”The lesson of “Air” can also be applied to the new company that produced it. Artists Equity was co-founded by Damon and his longtime friend Ben Affleck to make movies that earn more money for their artistic talent. “Air” — directed by Affleck, who also plays the Nike co-founder and chief executive Phil Knight — was deliberately the company’s first project.“Thematically it was on point in terms of what we’re trying to do with the new company,” Damon said of “Air.”He elaborated: “Sonny feels, like we do, that the people who are putting the value in something deserve to share in the revenue and be compensated, and rather than it being extractive, it’s a partnership.”Damon as Vaccaro in the film. The drama’s concerns were thematically “on point in terms of what we’re trying to do with the new company,” he said.Ana Carballosa/Amazon StudiosThe message of “Air” might help explain why it has been embraced by critics and audiences. It turns Michael Jordan from an extraordinary athlete into a stand-in for the viewer. “He’s not the underdog compared to the everyday person, but he’s still someone people can relate to,” said Thilo Kunkel, a professor at Temple University who studies athlete branding.In real life, it was Nike that initially offered Jordan a piece of the business — it was “the bait on the fishing hook,” Vaccaro said in an interview. Nike had been desperate to outbid its larger rivals, Converse and Adidas, to secure the rights to a player it predicted would be a generational talent.The film closely reflects reality, Vaccaro added, in portraying this proposal as important to Deloris Jordan, the central decision maker in her household. “She reminded me 10 times before you saw it in the last scene,” Vaccaro said, adding, “The only reason that we survived and we won was because of him having a piece.”Vaccaro’s career in basketball and the shoe business is rich enough that years ago there was very nearly a movie made about a completely different period of his life (he was to have been played by James Gandolfini). Vaccaro started organizing high school all-star games in the 1960s. At Nike he not only helped sign Jordan, he also pioneered contracts with college basketball coaches that put Nike sneakers on their players, as N.C.A.A. rules barred the athletes from making their own deals. In the ’90s, he signed Kobe Bryant to Adidas.Vaccaro’s career in the sneaker business included jobs with Nike, Reebok and Adidas before he played a role in the O’Bannon case, which ultimately led the N.C.A.A. to allow college athletes to make endorsement deals.Ariel Fisher for The New York TimesBut the real-life Vaccaro took to heart the moral of “Air” during his late-career shift from shoe-company veteran to gadfly who helped college athletes win the right to sign endorsement deals of their own.In 2007, he quit the sneaker business (his résumé also included Reebok) and became an advocate for college players’ rights. For lawyers looking to sue over colleges’ profiting from their players’ names, images and likenesses, Vaccaro helped find an ideal lead plaintiff: the former U.C.L.A. basketball star Ed O’Bannon. The lawsuit filed in 2009 and known as the O’Bannon case, along with other lawsuits, state legislation and a sea change in public opinion — itself cultivated partly by Vaccaro, an easy and colorful quote for journalists — led the N.C.A.A. in 2021 to begin letting college athletes sign endorsement deals.“To allow me to get to Eddie O’Bannon — it never would have happened without me being with Michael Jordan,” Vaccaro said.Jay Bilas, an ESPN college basketball commentator, perceives a connection between Jordan’s securing a cut of his Nike business and Vaccaro’s lobbying to get college athletes more of the profits they help generate.“It’s the same analysis,” said Bilas, who played basketball for Duke University when Jordan was on the archrival University of North Carolina Tar Heels. “Whether it’s an hourly worker negotiating with McDonald’s or doctors and nurses negotiating with a hospital system, what’s always true is that the business is going to make substantially more than the worker. Everyone in America, in a free-market system, deserves the right to negotiate for their fair value.”At the film premiere last month, Damon said, the audience “erupted into applause” at the end when onscreen text described Vaccaro’s involvement in the O’Bannon case.“It was thematically right for the movie, but it was also perfect for Sonny,” Damon said.“The obvious thing he would go do was go fight for them,” Damon added. “It’s in keeping with how you see him throughout the movie, genuinely caring — it’s not just business for him. This is his passion and it’s his love. There’s a morality that grounds it.”Damon is engaged in a similar enterprise. He and Affleck substituted filmmakers for athletes into Vaccaro’s equation, and, backed by $100 million from a private investment firm, started Artists Equity last year to restore to filmmakers a share of projects’ profits that had disappeared as Hollywood moved toward streaming and studios scaled back on the most generous deals.In Artists Equity’s view, turning filmmakers — from stars like Damon and Davis to directors, cinematographers and editors — into something less like employees and more like financial partners will give them an incentive to make better movies more efficiently.“Sonny feels, like we do, that the people who are putting the value in something deserve to share in the revenue and be compensated, and rather than it being extractive, it’s a partnership,” Damon said.Ariel Fisher for The New York Times“‘Profit participation’ is the key phrase,” said Jason Squire, a professor emeritus at the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts. “If they fulfill this, it’ll be a wonderful, refreshed model for this part of the business.”For its part, “Air” appears to be a financial success. The film was acquired by Amazon for $130 million. It opened last Wednesday exclusively in theaters (in advance of becoming available on Amazon’s streaming platform), and exceeded expectations with a box office take that hovered around $20 million.Affleck’s argument for the model could have come from Deloris Jordan. “This business has never incentivized and made congruent the interest of the artist and the people financing,” he said at a New York Times conference last year. Referring to his wife, the pop star and actress Jennifer Lopez, he added, “The people who principally create value on the sales side and on the audience eyeball side are these artists who have worked their entire careers — like my wife — building a name, a reputation, a connection with fans that has real value. And oftentimes that value isn’t reflected in the deals.”There is an irony in the argument about people getting shortchanged by the old way of doing business. Michael Jordan, Matt Damon — these are some of the more enviable people on Earth.But anyone who has shelled out for a pair of Air Jordans or watched the Chicago Bulls win six world championships in the 1990s can testify that Jordan deserved a good deal of credit.And in ceding a small percentage of the Air Jordan profits to its namesake, Nike did not exactly suffer. Along with the applause-generating reveal about Vaccaro’s successful advocacy on behalf of college athletes, the viewer of “Air” learns at the end of the film that Nike went on to buy its former rival Converse on its way to becoming the juggernaut it is today. Last year, Nike said Jordan Brand brought in $5 billion in annual revenue.“Ben says it as the Phil Knight character,” Damon said. “He goes, ‘If this kid makes a bunch of money on this deal, it will be the best thing that ever happened for Nike.’ Right? It was really a deal that favored everybody. Absolutely everybody won.” More

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      in Soccer

      Brett Goldstein Faces Life After ‘Ted Lasso’

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      LONDON — A few minutes into coffee last spring, Brett Goldstein wanted to show me something on his phone.I leaned over and saw puppeteers sitting on skateboards while they hid behind a table, rolling into one another in apparent bliss as their hands animated a clowder of felt cats above their heads. For Goldstein this represented a kind of creative ideal, as pure an expression of fun, craft and unbridled glee as any human is likely to encounter.“Imagine this is your actual job,” he said, his breathtaking eyebrows raised in wonder.Goldstein shot this behind-the-scenes video during his time as a guest star on “Sesame Street,” an experience this Emmy-winning, Marvel-starring comic actor and writer still describes as the single best day of his life.The clip is inarguably delightful, but Goldstein hardly has to imagine such a job. As the breakout star of “Ted Lasso,” the hit comedy about a tormented but terminally sunny American coach winning hearts, minds and the occasional football match in England, he is part of an ensemble that brought as much bonhomie, optimism and warmth to the set as Ted himself, played by the show’s mastermind, Jason Sudeikis, brought to the screen.“I will be absolutely devastated when it ends,” Goldstein said last year. “I think we all will.”And now it has ended. Or maybe it hasn’t. What is certain is that the new season of “Ted Lasso,” which starts on Wednesday, will conclude the three-act story the creators conceived in the beginning and there are no plans for more. Whether and how more tales from the Lassoverse arrive is up to Sudeikis, who told me he hadn’t even begun to ponder such things. “It’s been a wonderful labor of love, but a labor nonetheless,” he said.So even if the new season isn’t the end, it represents an end, one that hit Goldstein hard. In a video call last month, he confirmed that while shooting the finale in November, he kept sneaking off to “have a cry.”But even if “Lasso” is over for good, it is also inarguable that Goldstein has made the most of it. Chances are you had never heard of him three years ago, when he was a journeyman performer working on a TV show based on an NBC Sports promo for a service, Apple TV+, that few people had. (Humanity had plenty else to think about in March 2020.)Brett Goldstein, Brendan Hunt and Jason Sudeikis in the third and final season of “Ted Lasso.”Apple TV+But things have moved fast for him since “Ted Lasso” became the pre-eminent feel-good story of the streaming era, both in form — as an underdog sports tale about the importance of kindness — and function, as a surprise hit and career boost for a bunch of lovable, previously unheralded actors who have now amassed 14 Emmy nominations for their performances.None of them have turned “Ted Lasso” into quite the launchpad that Goldstein has. His Roy Kent, a gruff, floridly profane retired player turned coach, was an immediate fan favorite, and Goldstein won Emmys for best supporting actor in a comedy both seasons. He was also one of the show’s writers and parlayed that into a new series: “Shrinking,” a comedy about grief and friendship. Goldstein developed it with Bill Lawrence, another “Lasso” creator, and Jason Segel, who stars along with Harrison Ford. (It is Ford’s first regular TV comedy role.)Thanks to “Shrinking,” which came out in January and was just renewed for another season, you might have encountered Goldstein on “Late Night With Stephen Colbert,” “The Today Show,” “CBS Saturday Morning” or some podcast or another.Thanks to his surprise debut as Hercules — Hercules! — in a post-credits scene in Marvel’s 2022 blockbuster “Thor: Love and Thunder,” you will soon see him everywhere.Brett Goldstein in a scene from “Thor: Love and Thunder.”MarvelNone of this had come out when we met last year. Back then, he was still struggling to make sense of the ways “Ted Lasso” had changed his life after two decades of working in comparative obscurity in London’s theater and comedy trenches. Whatever the hassles of losing his anonymity, he said, they were more than offset by the benefits — the visit to “Sesame Street,” the opportunity to work with a childhood hero like Ford, the chance to work on “Lasso” itself.“I would happily do it for 25 more years,” he said, but that’s out of his hands.What Goldstein can control is what he does with his new Hollywood juice, which currently includes a second season of “Shrinking,” other TV concepts in development and whatever emerges from the whole Hercules thing. (He’s already mastered Marvel’s signature superpower: the non-comment.)No matter how long this window of opportunity stays open, he’s still chasing the same simple thing: a slightly coarser version of what he captured in that “Sesame Street” video.“It’s a bunch of grown people having the time of their [expletive] lives being very, very silly but also creating something that’s meaningful,” Goldstein said. “And it’s [expletive] joyous.”OK, a significantly coarser version. But to understand why, it helps to know a little about how he got here.‘I very much relate to the anger.’Goldstein, 42, grew up in Sutton, England, as a soccer nut by birthright — his father is a Tottenham Hotspur fanatic — who became just as obsessed with performing and movies, spending hours as a boy recreating Indiana Jones stunts in his front yard.Improbably, all of the above contributed to his current circumstances: It was his performing and soccer fandom that led to “Ted Lasso,” and he is now writing lines for Indiana Jones himself in “Shrinking” — lines Ford says while playing a character inspired by Goldstein’s father.But it took Goldstein a few decades to arrive at such an exalted position. After a childhood spent acting in little plays and his own crude horror shorts, he studied film and literature at the University of Warwick. He continued writing and performing through college and beyond, in shorts and “loads of plays at Edinburgh Fringe and off, off, off, off West End,” he said. A short film called “SuperBob,” about a melancholy lo-fi superhero played by a beardless Goldstein, eventually led to a cult feature of the same name.More important, it caught the eye of the casting director for “Derek” (2012-14), Ricky Gervais’s mawkish comedy about a kindly simpleton (played by Gervais) working at a senior care facility. Goldstein played a nice boyfriend. “That was my first proper TV job, and then it was slightly easier,” he said.Along the way he tried standup and it became an abiding obsession — even now he tries to perform several nights a week. “He’s always been the sexy, hunky dude in, like, really tiny comedic circles,” said Phil Dunster, who plays the reformed prima donna Jamie Tartt in “Lasso” and first met Goldstein roughly a decade ago, when he performed in one of Goldstein’s plays. (Dunster remembers being dazzled and intimidated by his eyebrows.)At some point a fan of Goldstein’s standup mentioned him to Lawrence, a creator of network hits like “Spin City” and “Scrubs,” who checked out Goldstein in a failed pilot and was impressed enough to cast him in his own new sitcom in 2017.That one also never made it to air. By then Goldstein was in his late 30s. “I had a sort of epiphany of, ‘I’ve missed my window,’” he said.Then came “Ted Lasso.”“I will be absolutely devastated when it ends,” Brett Goldstein said of “Ted Lasso.” “I think we all will.”Magdalena Wosinska for The New York TimesThe show’s creators, who also included Brendan Hunt and Joe Kelly, wanted some English soccer fans on staff, and Lawrence thought of Goldstein. He was hired as a writer but soon became convinced that he was the person to play the surly, fading pro Roy Kent. As scripting on the first season wrapped up, he made a video of himself performing several Roy scenes and sent it to the creators, stipulating that if he was terrible, all involved would never speak of it again. He was not terrible.It’s a story he has told many times. But it hits different in person, as the gentle fellow in a fitted black T-shirt recounts how he felt a bone-deep connection to the irascible Roy. The face is essentially the same, but the eyes are too friendly and the voice is smooth and mellifluous where Roy’s is a clipped growl.“I get that you would be confused by this,” Goldstein said, setting his coffee cup neatly into its saucer. “But I very much relate to the anger. I used to be very, very miserable and had a quite dark brain, and I’ve worked very hard at changing that. But it’s there.”Lawrence said that “of all the shows I’ve ever done, Brett is one of the top two people in terms of how different he is from his character.” (The other: Ken Jenkins, the friendly actor who played the caustic Dr. Kelso in “Scrubs.”)In some ways the connection between actor and character is clear. Both are prolific swearers, for one thing, and Goldstein lives by the chant that defines his famous alter-ego: He’s here, he’s there, he’s everywhere.Colleagues and friends are stupefied by how much he does. While shooting the first season of “Lasso,” he was also flying to Madrid to shoot “Soulmates,” the sci-fi anthology series he created with Will Bridges. During filming for Season 3, he acted in “Lasso” by day and joined the “Shrinking” writers’ room on video calls by night. He found time to interview comics, actors, filmmakers and friends for his long-running movie podcast, “Films to be Buried With.” He regularly squeezed in standup sets.“I’m not sure when he sleeps,” Dunster said. “But I know he gets it in, because he looks so young.”Goldstein said his workaholism predates his newfound Hollywood clout. “Even when I was doing stuff that no one was watching, I was always working,” he said. “Either I’m mentally unwell, or genuinely this is the thing that gives me purpose and makes me happy.”He acknowledged that both could be true. But then if “Ted Lasso” has taught us anything, it’s that nobody is just one thing.‘We joke our way through this.’“Ted Lasso” is a sprawling comic tapestry woven from characters — a wounded team owner (played by Hannah Waddingham), an insecure publicist (Juno Temple), a spiteful former protégé (Nick Mohammed) — threading their way toward better selves. The new season finds the AFC Richmond squad at its underdoggiest yet, back in England’s mighty Premier League and destined for an uncertain but sure to be uplifting fate.“Shrinking” is more intimate, a show about hard emotions and hanging out that happens to star a screen legend whose presence still astounds everyone. “It’s a year later and I still go, ‘Bloody hell, that’s Harrison Ford,’” Goldstein said.Harrison Ford is one of the stars of “Shrinking,” an Apple TV+ series Goldstein helped create. “It’s a year later and I still go, ‘Bloody hell, that’s Harrison Ford,’” Goldstein said.Apple TV+Ford’s character is an esteemed psychologist who has received a Parkinson’s diagnosis. He was inspired by several real-life figures, including Lawrence’s grandfather, who also had Parkinson’s disease; his father, who has Lewy body dementia; and his old friend from “Spin City,” Michael J. Fox. The character was also based on Goldstein’s father, another Parkinson’s survivor.“Brett and I share this thing with our families that we joke our way through this,” Lawrence said.Goldstein is exceedingly private about his personal life, but his father gave him permission to discuss the link — his reasoning was that he wasn’t ashamed of the condition and couldn’t hide it anyway. “And also,” he told his son, “the fact that I can tell people Harrison Ford is based on me is a pretty cool thing.”Goldstein joked that this gift he has given his father has expanded their conversational canvas by roughly 100 percent: “Football is still all me and my dad talk about,” he said. “That and the fact that he’s Harrison Ford.”The former, at least, is the way it’s always been. “I think that’s why sport exists,” he said. “It’s a way of saying ‘I love you’ while never saying ‘I love you.’”Such Trojan-horsing of human emotion has become Goldstein’s default mode, whether it’s using his podcast guests’ favorite films to get at their real fears and desires, portraying the discomfort of vulnerability via a clenched soccer star, or writing Parkinson’s jokes to work through the painful fact of his parents’ mortality.“Even when I was doing stuff that no one was watching, I was always working,” Goldstein said. “Either I’m mentally unwell, or genuinely this is the thing that gives me purpose and makes me happy.”Magdalena Wosinska for The New York TimesSegel said that Goldstein is always the one on “Shrinking” insisting that no matter how punchy the punch lines, the feelings must be pure and true. This wasn’t surprising, he added, because Goldstein is a Muppets fan.“It sounds like a joke,” said Segel, who as a writer and star of “The Muppets” (2011) does not joke about such things. “But it speaks to a lack of fear around earnest expression of emotion.”Which brings us back to the cat video and Goldstein’s other Muppet-related fascinations. (“The Muppet Christmas Carol” might be his favorite move ever, he said, and he’s been known to perform an abridged version on standup stages.)Those looking for a felt skeleton key to unlock his various idiosyncrasies aren’t likely to find one. But his Muppet affection does offer a glimpse at what motivates him as a performer, creator and workaholic, which is less about opportunities, franchises or scale than the vulnerability and risks of trying to reach someone and the openness required to take it in. The thing he’s always looking for, he told me over and over — to the point that he started apologizing for it — is a bit of human connection in a world that can seem designed to thwart it.“They put up this Muppet and I’m gone,” he said. “But that requires from both of us a leap of faith, like, ‘We’re doing this, and I’m all in and you’re all in.’ And if one of us did not commit to this thing then it’s [expletive] stupid — it’s just a [expletive] felt thing on your hand, and I’m an idiot for talking to it and you’re an idiot for holding it.“Do you know what I mean?” More

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      in Soccer

      These Soccer and World Cup Movies Have Big Goals

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      Soccer movies are often eclectic and at times unclassifiable, drawing from multiple continents and genres.Every four years, the World Cup offers something not unlike the movies: For a whole month, it stops time, enveloping its distant spectators in the electric-green glow of the screen.But there’s more to the “beautiful game” than balletic ball-moves and the cheek-gnawing suspense of gameplay characterized by low score count. Ladj Ly’s 2019 crime thriller, “Les Misérables,” set in the immigrant-populated underworld of the Parisian banlieues, paints it vividly: In the opening minutes, we’re plunged into the Champs-Élysées, where throngs of fans draped in red, white and blue celebrate France’s victory at the 2018 World Cup. The pulsing moment is one of communal exultation at odds with the film’s forthcoming depiction of a fractious multiethnic society.“The thing about football — the important thing about football — is that it is not just about football,” the English author Terry Pratchett wrote in the novel “Unseen Academicals.” This observation could very well apply to all sports built on mass followings and billion-dollar business deals, but soccer — a potent symbol of globalization heavy with historical baggage — is uniquely revealing: The game is a prism through which the ever-evolving world, and the interconnected fortunes of people from disparate parts of it, comes to light.No wonder soccer movies are often eclectic and at times unclassifiable, drawing from multiple continents and genres. Take John Huston’s World War II adventure drama “Escape to Victory.” Pelé, the legendary Brazilian striker, is joined by Sylvester Stallone, Michael Caine, and real-life professional footballers from across Europe and North and South America to play ball against Nazi rivals. And from Hong Kong, there’s Stephen Chow’s hit kung fu comedy “Shaolin Soccer,” a nod to the fast-growing popularity of soccer throughout Asia, released one year before the 2002 World Cup in Japan and South Korea. Not that soccer films are all about global cooperation and underdog badassery; other films poke fun at the game’s biggest icons. For this, see the brilliantly unhinged “Diamantino,” a surreal Portuguese spy movie spoof featuring a Cristiano Ronaldo look-alike who gets in the zone by imagining himself in a cotton-candy field surrounded by elephant-size Pomeranians.Stephen Chow in “Shaolin Soccer,” which he also directed.Miramax FilmsThe 2022 World Cup in Qatar, the first ever held in a Middle Eastern nation, has courted countless controversies, with the host country’s conservative traditions starkly at odds with the sport’s modern fandoms. FIFA and Qatar have been pelted with charges of corruption and bribery, but most harrowing, perhaps, are reports of the country’s exploitative use of migrant labor, resulting in the deaths of thousands of workers from primarily South Asian and African countries. The documentary “The Workers Cup” (2018) takes us to the labor camps erected on the outskirts of Doha, where we meet a handful of soccer-enthusiast workers who come to terms with the underpinnings of a brutal industry — the same one responsible for nurturing their own athletic dreams.Since the start of the tournament, fans and players have spoken out about the region’s thorny politics (including the criminalization of homosexuality) and religious practices. On this front, and on the matter of soccer’s ability to ease or exacerbate ethnic tensions, the documentary “Forever Pure” (2017) comes to mind. Directed by Maya Zinshtein, it traces one of the ugliest episodes in Israeli soccer, doubling as an exposé into what it sees as the country’s systemic racism. Consisting of interviews with the players, owners and fans of the Beitar Jerusalem Football Club, the documentary examines the reactions of these individuals against the addition of two Muslim players to the team — and the language of racial purity used to justify their opposition.Corneliu Porumboiu, right, in his documentary, “Infinite Football,” with Laurentiu Ginghina.Grasshopper FilmLess inflammatory but similarly illuminating are two documentaries that plumb political dimensions through intensely personal stories of soccer obsession — both by the Romanian auteur Corneliu Porumboiu. The first, “The Second Game,” features voice-over commentary from Porumboiu and his father as the two watch a 1988 match refereed by the elder Porumboiu between two of Romania’s leading squads. The game takes place one year before the revolution that toppled the country’s totalitarian leader, ‌Nicolae Ceausescu — a period in which Romanian soccer was openly a tool of political scheming; one team was associated with the military, the other with the secret police. At the same time, there’s the slightest hint of nostalgia as the two men look back on several players, considered part of Romania’s golden generation of soccer, who would eventually leave the country to play for more prestigious professional teams in Western Europe.The second film, “Infinite Football,” introduces us to a hobbling ex-footballer-turned-pencil-pusher with an elaborate plan to reinvent the rules of the game, to better prevent injuries like the one that ended his athletic career. It’s a parable for the fractured state of Romania itself through the lens of one man’s desperate attempt to fix what broke him.In the first week of this year’s tournament, members of the Iranian team refused to sing the national anthem before their game against England — a display of solidarity with an ongoing protest movement against Iran’s leadership, spurred by the killing of a young woman in police custody. The confluence of these events brings to mind one of the great soccer movies of the past twenty years, “Offside” (2007) by Jafar Panahi, the Iranian master currently imprisoned for his political beliefs. A pointed critique of the country’s misogynist strictures delivered at the pitch of a dark comedy, the film follows a group of women who have been caught disguising themselves as men to enter a Tehran stadium where a match will determine Iran’s qualification for the 2006 World Cup.Golnaz Farmani in “Offside.”Sony Pictures ClassicsLike “Offside,” several international films consider the way soccer fandom pits modernity against traditional ways of life, simply through the struggles of people attempting to watch a game. “The Cup” (2000) was the first film from Bhutan to be submitted for an Oscar, featuring real-life Tibetan monks swept up in the frenzy of the 1998 World Cup. A group of novices lead makeshift soccer games using a can of Coca-Cola as a ball, and at night sneak away from the monastery to watch the Cup in a nearby cottage. Granted permission to set up a television on monastery grounds for the final game between France and Brazil, the boys race to collect funds for a satellite dish and set up the device in time for kickoff.The same dynamic plays out across three different remote locations in Gerardo Olivares’s gentle mockumentary “The Great Match” (2006), which is also structured around the struggle to watch a World Cup final — the 2002 showdown between Brazil and Germany. The film follows the misadventures of three unrelated groups of soccer fans: Kazakh nomads from the Eastern Mongolian steppes, camel-mounted Berber tribespeople in the Sahara, and Indigenous Amazonians.Both films present the love of soccer as a universal bond, a bitter pill considering it might also be the only common ground between us viewers and these disappearing cultures — soccer, after all, is nothing if not a tool of cultural hegemony. At the same time, though the stakes aren’t a matter of life or death, the passion of these fans — the way they persist in their efforts to seize a small slice of pleasure in a world of tireless work, exile and material hardship — might say something about what soccer would have to offer were it stripped of its territorial fanatics and its billion-dollar pomp and ceremony.Where to Stream These Soccer MoviesStream “Les Misérables” on Amazon Prime Video.Rent “Escape to Victory” on multiple digital platforms.Stream “Shaolin Soccer” on Paramount+ or the Criterion Channel.Stream “Diamantino” on major digital platforms.Stream “The Workers Cup” on multiple digital platforms.Rent “Forever Pure” on Apple TV.Stream “The Second Game” on the Criterion Channel or Mubi.Stream “Infinite Football” on the Criterion Channel or Kanopy.Stream “Offside” on the Criterion Channel.Stream “The Cup” on the Criterion Channel.Stream “The Great Match” on Tubi or Film Movement Plus. More

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      A Paean to the Gods (and Shammgods) of New York City Hoops

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      Some of the most memorable characters in New York basketball history gathered in Manhattan for a screening of the documentary film “NYC Point Gods,” a tribute to — well, to them.There is little left that defines New York City basketball, save for the Knicks’ eternal search for an impactful lead guard. It’s a search that has always been inflamed, exacerbated and magnified by the abundance of point guards bred by the city.There was the incandescent Pearl Washington, who rode a motorcycle and sometimes wore a fur to playground games, and whose tremendous dribbling for Syracuse destroyed Georgetown’s dominant full-court press in the Big East tournament.And God Shammgod, the worshiped Harlem guard who played a game within the game by offering the ball up to defenders with his right hand and then ripping it back with his left. The move, still replicated in N.B.A. games by Russell Westbrook and others, is known as the Shammgod.From them and others, New York point guards learned that moxie, flair and unimpeachable handles were just as important as the ability to initiate an offense. But the era that established the archetype of the New York point guard — pillared in the 1970s and 80s by Catholic schools that have since closed for lack of funding and playground courts that saw their rims removed during the Covid-19 pandemic — is gone.For a rare moment on Wednesday night, it was reanimated at a screening of “NYC Point Gods,” a feature-length Showtime documentary that pays homage to the guards who gave the city its rep. The film was produced by Kevin Durant and his business partner and agent, Rich Kleiman. Durant, a New York transplant, wore Dior as he doled out hugs to the documentary’s subjects. Kleiman, a native, gleamed in gold aviator glasses as he introduced the film to shouts from the audience that referred to him as Ace, as in Rothstein, the protagonist of the movie “Casino.”Durant and God Shammgod greet each other at the premiere.Theo Wargo/Getty ImagesThe venue was Manhattan West Plaza, a cathedral to the power of real estate development ordained into usefulness by a New York tradition: hoopers paying homage to hoopers.That term is an honorific that disregards professional status and statistics and can be conferred only by another hooper. It doesn’t matter if you had a 20-year N.B.A. career or if your best performances are now remembered only by basketball griots. There’s a reverence among hoopers. Did you make those who watched you play love the game as you did? Did you give the crowd an “I was there when” story?Outside the Midnight Theatre, camera flashes greeted Rafer Alston and Kenny Anderson, who walked the red carpet with his mom. Sabrina Ionescu, of the W.N.B.A.’s Liberty, sidled up for hugs with Nancy Lieberman and Niesha Butler. Jayson Tatum, of the Boston Celtics, deferentially cupped hands with Anderson as Paul Pierce spelled his name for a puzzled list-holding publicist.Once the film rolled, though, the guards’ trademark toughness washed away as they listened to each other’s stories. “It was very emotional, not just for myself, but, you know, I lived and witnessed those stories of the other guys and girls also,” said Mark Jackson, a former Knicks point guard who starred at St. John’s. Seated alongside his four children, he dabbed at his eyes as he heard Kenny Smith, a Queens-born retired N.B.A. champion, describe how Jackson’s smarts led him to a nearly 17-year pro career.Mark Jackson with his children.Amanda Westcott/ShowtimeAt its heart, “Point Gods” is the hoopers’ oral history of how the city created a lineage at the position. Shammgod developed his dribble because his gym teacher, Tiny Archibald, told him it would make him perpetually valuable to any team. Only by watching a V.H.S. mixtape compilation of point guard highlights called “Below the Rim” did he learn of Archibald’s previous work.That revelation drew a crack of laughter inside the screening, where, earlier, attendees jostled over seats and settled in with the shoulder-to-shoulder intimacy of the city’s bandbox parks. Dao-Yi Chow, a lauded fashion designer, sat near a far wall wearing Jackson’s Knicks jersey. Clark Kent, whose real name is Rodolfo Franklin and who goes by the Rucker Park-ian nickname “God’s Favorite DJ,” held down a back-row seat. Kent produced a chunk of Jay-Z’s debut “Reasonable Doubt,” which dropped in 1996, the year Jeff Van Gundy took over the Knicks.For his part, Jay-Z had welcomed Shammgod on a nearby rooftop patio before the screening. The rapper and mogul was a mainstay of Rucker Park’s Entertainer’s Basketball Classic in the early aughts, and his attempt to woo Kareem Reid from a rival’s team with a bag of cash is told by that rival, the rapper Fat Joe. The exact sum, rumored to be in the thousands, is bleeped out in the retelling as Joe recounts the Mafioso-style meeting he had with Reid to convince him not to jump ship. Reid, who had a cup of coffee with the N.B.A.’s Hornets in 2003, stayed.When the film showed LeBron James, Beyoncé and N.B.A. Commissioner David Stern (wearing Joe’s platinum and diamond chain) making summer pilgrimages to the park, a woman seated four rows from the screen yelped, “I was there,” “I was there,” “There too,” both tallying her attendance and bringing Harlem into the room.In another scene, the rapper Cam’ron — a Harlem native who played on several high school travel teams alongside some of the documentary’s subjects — explained that oohs and ahhs from the crowd were worth “five or six points” to a New York point guard.Cut to Anderson in a 1991 A.C.C. game. He’d been a high school legend at Archbishop Molloy in Queens, and New Yorkers who followed his career to Georgia Tech couldn’t wait to see him mix up Duke’s Bobby Hurley, who was notorious for his lax defense. The point guard cast hypes up what’s about to come, and Smith urges the director to pull the game footage up so he can narrate a grainy ESPN clip of the one-on-one clash.Kenny Anderson on the red carpet.Amanda Westcott/ShowtimeAnderson meets Hurley at the elbow, then takes his dribble behind his back and between his legs before gliding past a dazed Hurley for a floating layup. Unnoted was the fact that Duke won the game.Small matter. When it happened, only Dickie V’s hyperventilation on ESPN marked the moment as something special. “NYC Point Gods,” though, layered in the soundtrack of the hoopers who have told and retold the story as one of many chapters in their aggrandizing mythology.On film, though, Shammgod is awed. Stephon Marbury, who sported Anderson’s center-parted haircut in high school and followed him to Georgia Tech, leans into the retelling. The unscripted, ephemeral whoops from inside the screening, from N.B.A. stars and high school coaches and their playground peers, fell anew upon Anderson in the theater’s dark. More

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      Jane Campion and the Perils of the Backhanded Compliment

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      Jane Campion’s comment about Venus and Serena Williams reminded our critic of his own night of ‘botched fanciness’ and racial slights.Something about the way the director Jane Campion went overboard on Sunday to identify with, then insult, Venus and Serena Williams at an awards show brought to mind a night of botched fanciness that happened to me. A couple Fridays ago, I went to see some art: a Faith Ringgold retrospective at the New Museum in the afternoon, with friends; Norm Lewis singing at Carnegie Hall in the evening. (That was a solo trip.) For both, I wore a suit.The Ringgold show requires three floors and includes her 1967 masterpiece “American People Series #20: Die,” a blunt, bloody racial-rampage frieze that would be pure physical comedy about the era’s racial cataclysms were it not for the helpless terror in the faces she’s painted (Black men, women and children; white men, women and children). The scale of the canvas helps. It’s huge. Ringgold has always painted Black women in a range of moods, feelings, conditions, beauty. She gives them faces that feature both personal serenity and indicting alarm.I planted myself in a tight corridor that featured three works at the alarm end of things — the “Slave Rape” trio, from 1972. Each is a warm, sizable canvas of a woman nude and agape, framed by patchwork quilting, a signature of Ringgold. I was taking my time with one called “Slave Rape #2: Run You Might Get Away” — the woman is mid-flight, loosely shrouded by leaves, a big gold ring in each ear — when two strangers (women, white) parked themselves between me and the piece and continued a conversation I had heard them having in an adjacent gallery. They noticed neither me nor the depicted distress nor my engagement with it. I waited more than a minute before waving my hand, a gesture that seemed to irritate them.“Is something wrong?,” one stranger asked.“You’re in my way,” I told her.“Please accept our deepest apologies,” said her friend. If a middle ground exists between sincerity and sarcasm, these two had just planted a flag. But they did move, though not immediately, lest I relish some kind of relocation victory, and kept their talk of real estate and art ownership within earshot.The Faith Ringgold painting “American People Series #20: Die,” from 1967, in an  exhibition at the New Museum.Faith Ringgold/ARS, NY; Simbarashe Cha for The New York TimesAfter a drink with my friends I left for Carnegie Hall. A cab made sense. One pulled up, and the driver (male, brown) took a look at me, then noticed a white woman hailing a taxi up ahead and drifted her way, instead. When I jogged over to ask him what just happened — Is something wrong? — I was given no acknowledgment in the way only a guilty cabby can achieve. I chased the car half a block to photograph a plate number that you’d have to be Weegee to get just right. I’m not Weegee.I’d never been to Carnegie Hall. And I liked the idea that Norm Lewis was going to break me in. He played Olivia Pope’s senator ex on “Scandal” and one of the vets in Spike Lee’s “Da 5 Bloods.” He’s got a luscious, flexible baritone that I’d only ever encountered in recorded concerts on PBS. That night, backed by the New York Pops, he gave Stephen Sondheim, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Marvin Gaye the polished jewel treatment and pumped “Ya Got Trouble” with enough breathless gusto to make you wonder, with all due respect to Hugh Jackman, why the current “Music Man” revival isn’t starring him.As a solo performer, this was Lewis’s first show at Carnegie Hall, too. And people were anxious to see him and their beloved Pops. In a queue in the lobby before the show, one such person (woman, white) was making a point to push past me when I turned to ask if she was all right.“We’re going to will-call,” she said of herself and the gentleman she was with.“Ma’am, I think we all are,” I said.“We’re members. Are you?” she asked.I lied, hoping a yes would stanch her aggression.“Of the Pops?”She had me.“I like Norm Lewis,” I told her.“We love the Pops.”Venus Williams, left, and Serena Williams at the Critics Choice Awards; “King Richard,” a movie about their family, earned a best actor award for Will Smith.Frazer Harrison/Getty ImagesI was thinking about my night out a week later when one of the world’s great filmmakers saluted two of the world’s greatest athletes in an acceptance speech at the Critics Choice Awards. Jane Campion had been given the directing prize for a sneaky-deep ranch drama called “The Power of the Dog.” From the stage, Campion (woman, white) saluted Venus and Serena Williams and announced that she had taken up tennis but her body had told her to stop. In her nervous excitement, Campion was charming. She then took curious note of her plight as a woman in the film industry by informing the Williamses that they’ve got nothing on her. “You are such marvels,” she said, through a grin. “However, you do not play against the guys like I have to.”The Williams sisters were in the room that evening because a smart, tangy movie about their family, “King Richard,” was in the nominations mix, alongside Campion’s. “King Richard” is not about the time in 2001 when a California crowd booed and slurred Venus and Serena and their father, Richard, at a top tennis tournament. It’s not about the many mischaracterizations of their bodies, skills and intent in the press and by their peers. It’s not about the insidiously everlasting confusion of one sister for the other, the sort of thing that, just a few weeks ago, took place on a page of this newspaper. It’s not even about their fight, Venus’s particularly, to get women’s prize money even with men’s “King Richard” is about how the sisters’ parents molded and loved and coached them into the sort of people who can handle sharp backhands and backhanded compliments with the same power and poise.Even though Campion’s errant backhand had flown wide, the room lurched into cheers. Some of the applause came from Serena Williams, who has watched many a shot sail long. I had to desist further thought about the meaning of Campion’s aside. It was too confused. Was this a wish for the establishment of gendered guardrails for directors at award shows or the elimination of such distinctions in sports? Are there no men to be contended with in tennis? The line separating argument from accusation and accusation from self-aggrandizement was murky. I thought instead about the costs of the murk.Sunday afternoon, the Williamses got dressed up to celebrate some art. And somebody stood before them and challenged the validity of their membership, here in Campion’s restricted vision of sisterhood. The next day, Campion gushed an apology. These slips and slights and presumptions have a way of lingering, though. Their underlying truth renders them contrition-proof. I had every intention of keeping my date with Faith and Norm to myself. These incidents aren’t rare in fancyland, and therefore don’t warrant a constant spotlight because standing in its glare is exhausting. But Venus. Her face does something as Campion speaks. A knowing cringe. She and her family came out to soak up more of the praise being lavished on art about their life. They were invitees turned, suddenly, into interlopers, presenting one minute, plunged through a trap door the next. Faith Ringgold would recognize the discomfort. She painted it over and over. Run you might get away. But you probably won’t. More

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      ‘King Richard’ Review: Father Holds Court

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      Will Smith and Aunjanue Ellis play the parents of Venus and Serena Williams in a warm, exuberant, old-fashioned sports drama.The climactic scenes in “King Richard” take place in 1994, as Venus Williams, 14 years old and in her second professional tennis match, faces Arantxa Sánchez-Vicario, at the time the top-ranked player in the world. If you don’t know the outcome, you might want to refrain from Googling. And even if you remember the match perfectly, you might find yourself holding your breath and full of conflicting emotion as you watch the director Reinaldo Marcus Green’s skillful and suspenseful restaging.You most likely know what happened next. Venus and her younger sister Serena went on to dominate and transform women’s tennis, winning 30 Grand Slam singles titles between them (plus 14 doubles titles as a team) and opening up the sport to aspiring champions of every background. (They are credited as executive producers of this film.) You might also know that those achievements fulfilled an ambition that their father, Richard Williams, had conceived before Venus and Serena were born.In the years of their ascent, he was a well-known figure, often described with words like “controversial,” “outspoken” and “provocative.” “King Richard” aims in part to rescue Williams from the condescension of those adjectives, to paint a persuasive and detailed picture of a family — an official portrait, you might say — on its way to fame and fortune.In modern Hollywood terms, the movie might be described as a two-for-one superhero origin story, in which Venus (Saniyya Sidney) takes command of her powers while Serena (Demi Singleton) begins to understand her own extraordinary potential, each one aided by a wise and wily mentor. But this is a fundamentally — and I would say marvelously — old-fashioned entertainment, a sports drama that is also an appealing, socially alert story of perseverance and the up-by-the-bootstraps pursuit of excellence.It’s also a marriage story. When we first meet them, in the early 1990s, Richard (Will Smith) and his wife, Oracene (Aunjanue Ellis), are living with five daughters in a modest bungalow-style house in Compton, Calif. He works nights as a security guard, and she’s a nurse. Their shared vocation, though — the enterprise that is the basis of their sometimes fractious partnership — is their children.This is an all-consuming task: to bring up confident, successful Black girls in a world that is determined to undervalue and underestimate them. Tennis, which Richard chose partly because of its whiteness and exclusivity, is only part of the program.The children — Tunde (Mikayla Lashae Bartholomew), Lyndrea (Layla Crawford) and Isha (Daniele Lawson), along with Venus and Serena — lead highly structured, intensely monitored lives. (A disapproving neighbor calls the authorities, convinced that Richard and Oracene are being too hard on the girls.) This is partly protective, a way of keeping them away from what Richard ominously calls “these streets” — a menace represented by the hoodlums who harass Richard and the girls during practice sessions — but it also reflects his temperament and philosophy.He likes slogans and lessons, at one point forcing the family to watch Disney’s “Cinderella” to teach the importance of humility. “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail” is one of his favorite mottos. There is nothing haphazard or sloppy about “King Richard,” and it succeeds because it has a clear idea about what it wants to accomplish. The script, by Zach Baylin, is sometimes unapologetically corny — if you took a drink every time the Williams sisters say “yes, Daddy” you’d pass out before Venus won her first junior match — but the warmth and verve of the cast make the sentimentality feel earned.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      ‘Space Jam,’ My Dad and Me

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      A writer adored the basketball-Looney Tunes mash-up as a boy. Watching the movie again after his father died, he felt the movie resonate in a surprisingly deeper way.When I was 10, I thought the coolest person in the world was Michael Jordan. The second-coolest person in the world was my dad. He played in an amateur men’s soccer league; I preferred basketball, so MJ got the edge. Like a lot of kids who grew up in the ’90s, I revered the seemingly unbeatable Chicago Bulls, and I was devastated when, on Oct. 6, 1993, Jordan announced that he would be retiring from the NBA to play minor-league baseball with the Birmingham Barons. I liked baseball even less than I liked soccer.Jordan’s triumphant return to basketball in March 1995 was a moment of intense relief and exhilaration for me; and when the Bulls won their fourth championship, in the summer of 1996, my enthusiasm for Jordan reached a fever pitch. So when “Space Jam” debuted that autumn, I could not have been more excited. Michael Jordan teaming up with Bugs Bunny and the Looney Tunes in a feature film about a high-stakes basketball game? It was as if they had scanned my brain and made a movie of my innermost fantasies. I begged my dad to take me to see it, and the minute it was over, I begged him to take me to see it again.He was not especially impressed with “Space Jam,” but it was everything I dreamed it would be. First, it was hilarious. The Nerdlucks, a cabal of short, wormlike aliens who smack one another around like the Three Stooges, had me in stitches; my friends and I impersonated their screechy, helium-pitched voices for months, to gales of approving schoolyard laughter. Jordan’s bumbling, nebbish assistant Stan — played by Wayne Knight, whom I knew as the guy who gets smeared by a dilophosaurus in “Jurassic Park,” another childhood favorite — was hysterically funny. And of course the Looney Tunes cracked me up. When the Tasmanian Devil spins around a basketball court and cleans it single-handedly in a matter of seconds, declaring it “lemony fresh” — that seemed like the funniest thing I had ever heard in my life.Jordan with the Looney Tunes in 1996 — a young basketball fan’s dream lineup.Warner Bros.What I loved most about “Space Jam” was the candid glimpse it seemed to offer of Jordan’s life off the court. I had seen him in action, and in interviews as well as in commercials. But “Space Jam” showed me a family side of Jordan. Here was the star talking to his wife. Here was Jordan watching TV with his kids. And here was a flashback of a young Jordan, shooting hoops in the backyard, talking about his hopes and aspirations with his own dad.His father, played by Thom Barry, has only a small role in “Space Jam”: He appears in the first scene of the movie, watching his son drop bucket after bucket in the moonlight. “Do you think if I get good enough, I can go to college?” asks the young Michael, played by Brandon Hammond. “You get good enough, you can do anything you want to,” the elder Jordan replies. Mike starts rattling off his dreams: “I want to go to North Carolina … I want to play on the championship team … then I want to play in the NBA.”His dad takes the ball and says it’s time for bed. But Michael has one more dream to mention. “Once I’ve done all that,” Michael says, beaming up at his father, “I want to play baseball — just like you, Dad.”Last April, as the coronavirus was sending most of the world into lockdown, my dad died suddenly in his home late one night of a heart attack. He was 58. He’d been in immaculate health. We were extremely close, and spoke or texted every day. I was shattered.Around the same time, ESPN began to air “The Last Dance,” the network’s 10-part documentary series about Jordan and the ’90s Chicago Bulls. I watched the show in the weeks following my dad’s death as a distraction from my grief. But I was not prepared for the revelations of the seventh episode, which deals with the death of Jordan’s father, James R. Jordan, at the hands of carjackers in 1993. I was struck by certain similarities: how close Michael had been to his father, how much he relied on him as a mentor and a friend. James Jordan died a week shy of 57.A young Jordan (Brandon Hammond) and his father (Thom Barry) came to mean a great deal years later.Warner Bros.After that episode, I put on “Space Jam.” Again, I was looking for distraction; again, I was floored by grief. That opening scene with young Michael and his father, such a beautiful testament to a parent’s influence, now seemed completely overwhelming. Three years after his death, Jordan Sr. had been resurrected onscreen for a heartfelt tribute. And what’s more, Jordan had invoked his father as the reason he was pursuing baseball — a career move most people had dismissed as ridiculous.When Jordan announced his retirement, back in 1993, he told the gathered reporters that, although he was sad to leave the sport behind, he was glad his father had been alive to see his last game of basketball. The same line appears in “Space Jam,” in a restaging of the retirement news conference, and in light of the earlier scene with Jordan’s dad, the moment has a special emphasis.At the time, pundits could not fathom why someone as gifted as Jordan would give up his place at the top of one sport just to start at the bottom in an entirely different one. Jordan used “Space Jam” in part to explain his decision, to explain that while it looked as if he was following a whim, he was actually following his father. In light of my own loss, it seemed to me that Jordan was pouring his heart out. Watching last year — nearly 25 years later — I was profoundly moved.“Space Jam” was not really as candid about Michael Jordan’s home life as I believed when I was 10 and as “The Last Dance” made clear. Understandably, “Space Jam” did not touch on Jordan’s sometimes reckless gambling, nor on his embattled relationship with the media nor his weariness with the demands of fame. But the movie does contain some sincere and deep-seated wisdom about loss, which I was only able to see once I was was in mourning myself.It’s about looking up to somebody and wanting to follow in his footsteps. To do right by him. To reflect back the love that person selflessly showed you. And although it might seem strange to say of a movie about Michael Jordan playing basketball with Bugs Bunny, seeing that truth in “Space Jam” after all these years helped me deal with the pain of what I’d lost. More