Chariots of Tedium
Categories: Blogs, Featured
Written By: Eric Jensen
If you’ve read just about anything I’ve written on this site, then you know that I tend only to like the mustiest, fustiest of movies and that my opinions on film are more in line with critics than with the popular audience. But this isn’t always true. Sometimes I disagree with the critics and the audience.
As an example, let’s take the 1981 movie Chariots of Fire. It’s the true(ish) story of some British runners in the 1924 Olympic Games, it won a slew of awards (including the Oscar for Best Picture), and it’s beloved by critics and moviegoers everywhere.
Not by me, though.
It’s not a movie I’m prepared to come right out and say is bad. I think it’s probably just as good as people say. But, for whatever reason, I can’t get into it at all. I’m not sure exactly why I don’t like it, but there are a few possible reasons.
Most obviously, the movie’s about running. In terms of physicality, my lifestyle is more akin to Jabba the Hutt’s than Carl Lewis’s, so a celebration of the runner’s art isn’t exactly up my alley. Yet I don’t think this is the reason I don’t care for Chariots of Fire; the movie’s about running, sure, but it isn’t actually about running, any more than Rocky is actually about boxing, Breaking Away is about cycling, or The Deer Hunter is about hunting deer. Olympic races are just the pegs on which the characters’ stories hang, and I’ll take any such peg if the story on it is good enough.
The characters in Chariots of Fire do have stories, with their own personal motivations and triumphs and all that, but they never move me. I don’t care which of them wins any of the races, or if any of them win at all. If none of the main characters had participated in any of the film’s climactic for-the-gold races, I wouldn’t have minded or even necessarily noticed.
This isn’t a fault of the characterization, or the script, or the direction, or any of the things you can usually look to when you don’t like a movie. I’m pretty sure it’s just me.
It could be that I’m not British. This movie is British, and it loves being British, and it wants you to know just how great it is to be British and love being British. It revels in English and Scottish traditions and life. It gives you Gilbert and Sullvian’s “Carefully on Tiptoe Stealing,” with its lines about remaining an Englishman, as though it were the most stirring, awe inspiring thing in the history of man. I, alas, do not hail from the United Kingdom, and what’s more I find this kind of intense pride in accidents of birth to be rather silly. So it’s possible the disconnect between me and the picture comes from my lack of understanding of English nationalism.
Granted, lots of people who loved the movie aren’t British, either. So that’s probably not it.
What am I saying here? I guess I’m saying that I don’t like Chariots of Fire at all, but the odds are you will, so why not watch it.
BONUS NOTE: One thing I do like about the picture, and like a lot, is the music by Greek composer Vangelis. You’ve heard it a million times since in other things, but it’s great, so jam on it:
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