Blades of Glory (dir. Will Speck and Josh Gordon, 2007)
After a week of screeching headlines about a dystopian Winter Olympics, a doped-up Russian skating wunderkind, and said wunderkind’s motherland flirting with “the biggest war in Europe since 1945”, the ice-bound drama of 2007’s Blades of Glory has really had a run for its money. If one chooses to laugh rather than cry at the suppurating self-parodic sore into which this decade is spiralling, at least this latest, weirdest, instance of life imitating art offers an unplanned comedy masterclass — albeit one where the joke has soured.
The comedic premise of Blades of Glory is an ingenious one: a twist on the competitive ice skating world, distinguished from serious or semi-serious sports films, from Field of Dreams to Bring It On (or indeed from I Tonya to Cool Runnings) by its particularly American flavor. What if pairs figure skaters — the balletic, chiselled hetero couples seen swanning around the rink each season — were dudes? And what if one of those dudes was a doughy, sex addicted, amateur porn star named Chazz Michael Michaels?
The key joke in Blades of Glory reflects the strain of chest-thumping jingoism that wafts through every sports movie, no matter how parodic. “No one knows what it means,” says Chazz (Will Ferrell), of the Black Eyed Peas’ My Humps. “But it’s provocative. Gets the people going.” This line — immortalised in Kanye and Jay-Z’s well-known ode to the French capital — distils the spirit which Blades of Glory captured so well in its comedic form, before it seeped into everyday reality. By pairing up two dudes in, it hints, apparently the most girly, degenerate sport ever created — thus embarrassing the good ole red, white, and blue which they represent — Blades of Glory lines up a carnival of targets from within its own middle-American audience.
Our heroes are badboy rockstar skater Chazz (Ferrell) — a leatherbound furball who inexplicably rakes in the points with stationary crotch-grabbing — and his rival — wholesome, Disney-esque Jimmy (Jon Heder), a conventionally beautiful artiste, plucked from an orphanage and trained to sporting perfection like a racehorse by his cold-hearted foster father. (Another unfortunate resonance with headlines this week.) After a brawl on the medal podium, the two find themselves banned from the ice for life — until Jimmy’s superfan finds a loophole that will allow them to compete as a pair.
Sports movies are essentially about machismo — even when women are involved (or especially when women are involved, in the case of Million Dollar Baby and more recently Bruised). These gender neutral testosterone-splattering contests often hinge on an underdog’s battle against social stigma, weirdness, or generally being a bit rubbish — until a moral triumph leads them to victory. A tale as old as time — and one with a rich, juicy homoerotic undercurrent (“Achilles and Patroclus were just really good friends!”) wilfully neglected in much sporting propaganda.
The quintessentially American fear of accidentally mincing over the fine line between ‘macho’ and ‘gay’ — the terror of someone suddenly questioning the sweaty, towel-whipping locker room rituals that make the college quarterback into an Adonis — forms the heart of Blades of Glory’s comic premise. Smuggling this in under the unique diversions of an ice skating setup — and the uncomfortable giggles of regular screwball sex caper dynamics, warped in more ways than one — Blades of Glory juices tightly-executed jokes with all the ruthless precision of one of its star athletes.
