Semi-Pro vs. Bigger Stronger Faster*

Hey, sports movies! Who doesn't love 'em? They're the quintessential American movie, right? Because Hollywood ensures that the underdogs will always triumph. Not without pain, and not without some plot wrangling – but the regular schmoes will eventually be rewarded for all their hard work and effort. And the flip is also a given: the evil top dogs will be taken down, their sneaky tricks revealed, their cockiness vanquished.

But real life doesn't quite work like that, and neither do Semi-Pro or Bigger Stronger Faster*: the Side Effects of Being American. On the sports movie spectrum, these two flicks couldn't be further apart. Semi-Pro is a Will Ferrell vehicle that plays solely for laughs, as the Flint Tropics basketball team struggles to attain a high enough ranking to avoid dissolution as the semi-pro ABA league is rolled into the NBA. Bigger Stronger Faster is a documentary that tackles the issue of steroids in professional sports, and the tone could hardly be more serious.

Semi-Pro got rented at the behest of my beloved. I nobly vowed to suffer through it. I was pleasantly surprised. The ratio of stupid bodily-function jokes to actual basketball scenes was about 1:7, and I would have been happy with 1:3! The stereotypical spots are all here. The washed-up player yearning for a new chance? Hey, Woody Harrelson! The talented-but-cocky young player? Well, looky here, it's Andre 3000. The proto-emo white kid? He's here too. Oh, and Will Ferrell is Will Ferrell.

The plot is, to be honest, unimportant. The entire point of the movie is to run about in tiny 70's basketball shorts, wrestling bears and forcing Andre 3000 to dance in a seahorse costume (which he totally sells, by the way). Along the way, the underdog sports memes are checked off one by one. The inspiring speech? Check. The training montage? Check. The Moment of Truth? Check. The final all-out battle for survival against impossible odds? Check. Bears? Check. Okay, that last one isn't really on the list.

Semi-Pro goofs around with the memes only slightly, like when the team dreams of attaining fourth place instead of first. Otherwise, it's as predictable as the day is long. And at ninety minutes, we should all be glad it wasn't longer.

If Ferrell's movie was pure ridiculous sports fantasy, Bigger Stronger Faster is nasty sports reality. I went into BSF expecting something like a hard-hitting piece of investigative journalism. Piece by piece, a crack team of documentarians (is there such a thing?) would lay out the condemning evidence of steroids in sports, and we would learn all about the eeeevil they represent (and certainly a straightedger would come out of the theater feeling all smug, right?) In reality, BSF isn't like that at all.

Rather, Bigger Stronger Faster has the feel of an intensely personal project by (as far as I can tell) amateur filmmaker Christopher Bell, who also happens to have more than a few personal stories to tell about performance enhancing drugs. The look of the documentary recalls early Michael Moore (in a good way), probably because it comes from the producers of Bowling for Columbine. At times Bell even sounds like Moore as he ambles through the film, asking uncomfortable questions in a disarming way. But unlike Moore, Bell never comes off as snarky or simplistic. Perhaps that's because he is so obviously conflicted about the whole issue. He has no high-horse attitude because he is unwilling to frame the issue in black and white, to declare who is good and who is evil so the audience will know who to love and who to hate. How un-American!

While he lays out the facts of steroids (and other performance-enhancing drugs, including human growth hormones) in clever animated sequences, the moral issues refuse to coalesce into anything so easy to show. Bell interviews a huge range of people on the issue of steroids. From politicians like Joe Biden and Henry Waxman to sports figures both famous (i.e. Olympics famous) to obscure semi-pro athletes, it becomes clear that everyone looks at steroids a different way, and that everyone has their own agenda. Scientists talk about better research (which they'll get paid to do). Lawyers talk about lawsuits (which they'll get paid to argue). And athletes talk about winning, which they all desperately want to do.

Bell tries to cover as many aspect of the steroid controversy as he can. When it comes to enhancing one's body for competition, what's legal and what isn't? What about international competition? What about genetics? Where do we draw the line? Why are steroids a go-to metaphor for our talking heads? How much of the discussion around steroids is really about something else?

For example, maybe it's about the fantasy we call the American Dream. Maybe it's about our collective cynicism that everyone cheats. Maybe it's about our own insecurities. BSF offers no easy answers. But it asks good questions, and that's no small achievement.