Alex Gibney’s documentary about the disgraced German tennis star has wonderful archive footage and interviews but is ultimately unrevealing about its subject
Despite some great archive material and nice interview turns, this documentary portrait of disgraced German tennis legend Boris Becker from film-maker Alex Gibney is a frustrating and disappointing experience – because of the baffling way it is structured, both unrevealing and anticlimactic. It starts at the end, swoops back to the beginning and finally grinds to a halt somewhere around the middle. It could be that this is intended to be merely a first “episode”, though it isn’t billed as such.
We commence with Becker’s gripping downfall for tax evasion at London’s Southwark crown court in 2022, facing two-and-a-half years in prison and powerful interview testimony from the man himself: rueful, haunted, but rejecting self-pity. (In fact, Gibney seems to have had two interview sessions with him, one just before the verdict and one two years before that.) Then we cut back to his stunning 1985 Wimbledon triumph at the age of just 17, and his face is eerily cherubic.