Our most recent two-time Best Actress champion is back in theaters with Yorgos Lanthimos' Kinds of Kindness, a black-hearted tryptic that allows Emma Stone to experiment with three distinctly realized characters. To mark the occasion and the success of another tennis-related movie – Guadagnino's Challengers – let's think back to one of the few times this Academy favorite was in the race but didn't land a nomination. In 2017, right after her first Oscar win, Stone played Billie Jean King in Battle of the Sexes. Directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, the biopic was made in parallel with a Presidential election that saw a very different outcome than its titular match. Looking back, Battle of the Sexes reached for the zeitgeist yet failed to predict where the world was headed.
As for Stone, the project signaled her most outward flirtation with traditional prestige before her career went into another direction altogether…
Reading reviews and other such material from when Battle of the Sexes hit theaters, there is a significant point of disagreement between critics. Some writers praise Emma Stone's physicality as legendary tennis player Billie Jean King, pinpointing the various tricks she deploys to mimic an athlete's bearing. Others criticize her for the exact opposite, for failing to achieve the demeanor one recognizes in those who dedicate their lives to professional sports. Even among tennis fans, there seems to be division, so it's not as if one's familiarity with the sport's particularities indicates whether Stone's work is a winning move or an unforced error.
As someone who hasn't spent much time pondering the body language of tennis players, I can't hold up any such expertise when analyzing Stone's efforts. Yet, there's the experience as a viewer, something that should count for something regardless of pre-movie homework. Does Stone sell the idea of a tennis player, if not necessarily the specificities that would confirm and confer authenticity? Re-watching Battle of the Sexes, I would say so. Moreover, it strikes me as one of the actress' most pondered efforts, building a performance from the outside while keeping a sense of discipline about the whole endeavor.
It's curious, then, that Battle of the Sexes starts with a moment of kinetic abstraction, presenting Stone's King winning a match we can barely see. It's all in tremulous close-up, breaking up the straining body in fragments that are near illegible thanks to the blurry footage. The deployment of choppy slow-motion only adds to the effect, as if positing that we'll be seeing a portrait of Billie Jean King where the career that made her famous is but a framing device for the themes at hand. And rather than nudging you to look past the sports movie expectation, Dayton and Faris are forcing you to do it by making the alternative impossible.
Coupled with re-created press events, the filmmakers introduce us to King from a distance, sparking our curiosity. When held back, the viewer will automatically want to lean closer. For her part, Stone supports these readings by revealing her interiority at a gradual pace. At a 1970 celebration, her shoulders are hunched and her dancing seems awkward, and even the marital joy she exudes seems like an unsure performance. From there, we follow King into a confrontation with a promotor, announcing a boycott against the USTA over the prizemoney disparity between the women's and men's tournaments.
Starting in wavering disquiet, she becomes more outwardly confident as the conversation sours. There's a determination there, a sense of purpose that comes with the fighting spirit and the need to fight at all. She locks in and wastes few words and even fewer gestures. Yet, for all that the film shows us more of King, the framing and the performance maintain a safe distance. Her inner self is still out of reach. Thus, the spectator is drawn even closer, like the horse chasing a dangling carrot. It's at that point that a change occurs, as the character opens herself to the camera and, in a way, to herself. It's not just the audience discovering Billie Jean King. She's doing it too.
The ASMR hair salon scene is the picture's strongest serve, with camera and soundscape isolating King with the beautiful Marilyn Barnett. Through tight composition, the sportswoman is further disconnected from her body and identity as a player, with only Stone's expression visible. Slowly, the fake smile warms up into genuine joy, and the nervous energy of instant attraction replaces the awkwardness of someone pretending normalcy. Eros and romance hold hands and meld together as scissors cut through raven tresses, and eyes crinkle in a besotted trance. The remaining performance shall oscillate between this queer transcendence and King's determined strike against the sexist systems of organized sports – or maybe society as a whole.
They are the central tenets of Stone's approach which never reads as the classic mimesis one expects from Oscar hopeful biopics. Her Billie Jean King represents the real woman but also manages to work as a decontextualized personage whose specificities are evident without invoking off-screen memories or cultural legacies. In other words, there's enough here for Stone's King to function as an original character in her own right. Take the story out of history, and the character is still complete. That's especially true when talking about the scenes shared between Stone and Andrea Riseborough's Marilyn. Their courtship is tentative, prickling with the heat of newfound desires – there's an adolescent charm to it.
Stone is fantastic at telegraphing the rawness of King's attraction, the element of risk, and how such matters go out the window when fulfillment beyond the woman's wildest imagination becomes tangible. Her capitulation to the affair makes sense. It's freeing even as it complicates public life and a straight matrimony that may have never felt as real as this recent entanglement. And on that note, the same can be said about her palpable doubts, the shame, and the tension that sweeps in after orgasm in the cold light of morning. It's enough to make one's happiness feel unsustainable. And so, playing this queer character study within Battle of the Sexes, Emma Stone delivers some of the best work of her entire career.
That extends to the dereliction of a marriage once thought simple, smooth, sensible, and all those nice words. With Austin Stowell as Larry King, Stone gets to insinuate a shared history of discontentment painted over with a thin layer of camaraderie. One grasps that they like each other but don't know each other, which doesn't make her betrayal any less painful. The actors articulate it without resourcing to much in the way of demonstrativeness. Explosions never manifest, the union's slow death the kind of quiet that doesn't bother the folks in the hotel room next door. Then again, Billie Jean King doesn't seem the sort to put on a show to anyone, not even the Battle of the Sexes audience.
Against promotors and Margaret Court's homophobic ass, her anger is seething, expressed in direct jabs, at most a mutinous expression never breaking into the snarl other people would show with much less provocation. It's admirably restrained for Stone, who's not never been particularly reluctant to go broad or loud, to swing big. That colors how one perceives King's calm, for the potential for something fierier is constantly roiling right under the surface. It's a tightness that follows her as the film closes on the titular match, exulting the tactician side of King's approach, how she sees through Bobby Riggs' shtick, the societal forces converging around them, and what each of them represents to the public at large.
Because Stone is so good at all this, I wish the filmmakers were more interested in the oddity of the opponents' dynamic. I've praised the actress' ability to make her character live as an original rather than facsimile, but the compromises and contradictions of the actual friendship born between King and Riggs are such juicy material that their general absence makes the film poorer. If there's one thing that neither Stone nor her directors will complicate, it is their protagonists' legacy as a feminist icon. The decision strikes one as too easy, a wasted opportunity that denounces the project's timidity. It's too close to hagiography for comfort.
Though primarily script-related, these issues corrode Stone's characterization and what she can do with it. Beyond scenes of King's private life, the movie's second half feels more toothless than the first and more dominated by direct recreations, too. When saddled with playacting recorded press conferences and other such interactions, Stone does well but doesn't deepen our understanding of Billie Jean King. She's also at a loss when handling dialogue written with historical foresight in mind, unable to ground them when the film most needs it. Still, minor faults don't invalidate the greatness found elsewhere in Stone's performance, up to and including King's tears after she wins.
Yes, even the tennis player's physicality is a point in her favor. I'm still not sure if it's authentic, but it's convincing enough for me.
For her portrayal of Billie Jean King, Emma Stone was nominated for several honors. The most important were probably her nods at the Critics Choice Awards and the Golden Globes. There was also a litany of regional critics' citations that, at the time, may have seemed more impactful since they came enshrined in the afterglow of Stone's first Oscar win. However, AMPAS ignored the actress this time around. Instead, the Academy nominated Sally Hawkins in The Shape of Water, Frances McDormand in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, Margot Robbie in I, Tonya, Saoirse Ronan in Lady Bird, and Meryl Streep in The Post. McDormand won the second of three Best Actress Oscars for the Martin McDonagh movie, while Stone would return to Oscar glory through Yorgos Lanthimos' cinema – 2018's The Favourite and 2023's Poor Things. As we know, she won for the latter, having already taken Best Actress in 2016 for La La Land.
You can rent or purchase Battle of the Sexes on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, YouTube, the Microsoft Store, and Spectrum On Demand.