National Pastimes: Cinema, Sports, and Nation by Katharina Bonzel (review)

The sports film is one of cinema's most enduring genres, which spans the medium's history and comprises some of its most significant titles—from Thomas Edison's boxing films to Pride of the Yankees (dir. Sam Wood, 1942) to Million Dollar Baby (dir. Clint Eastwood, 2004). National identity is one of the sports film's time-honored themes. This theme is most obviously displayed by overblown films like Miracle (dir. Gavin O'Connor, 2004) that feature flag-draped young men motivated to achieve the extraordinary by the passion they share for their homeland. Katharina Bonzel's National Pastimes: Cinema, Sports, and Nation appropriately opens with a scene from Miracle that dramatizes the 1980 U.S. national hockey team's transformation from a motley crew of self-centered college kids into a brotherhood that—in true e pluribus unum fashion—beats the heavily favored USSR team en route to winning the gold medal.

Bonzel's book does not focus entirely on Miracle or its similarly syrupy cinematic kin. Instead, it demonstrates how national identity through sports films has subtler cultural contours that span contexts and shift over time. National identity in sports films, Bonzel shows, cannot be reduced to movies about the Olympics or other literal invocations of the nation-state. Instead, the productions that National Pastimes highlights demonstrate how national identity is formed, reinforced, and contested through varied cultural practices. In Bonzel's words, National Pastimes "examines how sports films work to tell stories about national identity and belonging. It argues that ideas about the nation are often represented in culture in unexpected ways, intersecting with social identities such as those grounded in ethnicity, race, class, and gender" (2). Put simply, Bonzel uses sports films to explain how different identities map onto normative understandings of the nation.

National Pastimes contributes to a small body of scholarship on sport and film, such as Aaron Baker's Contesting Identities: Sports in American Film (2003); Seán Crosson's Sport and Film (2013); Lester D. Friedman's Sports Movies (2020); and Leger Grindon's Knockout: The Boxer and Boxing in American Cinema (2013). While these books all at times engage the intersection of the sports film and national identity, Bonzel's book is distinguished by a concerted focus on the motif. Moreover, most of this scholarship is produced by Americans and focuses on American films. Bonzel, by contrast, explores a global range of productions that allows for productive international comparisons.

Bonzel's first chapter considers how Chariots of Fire (dir. Hugh Hudson, 1981) looks to England's past to build a nostalgic version of national unity for post–Thatcherite England. Similarly, Chapter 2 focuses on The Miracle of Bern (dir. Sönke Wortmann, 2003), an underexamined film that, according to Bonzel, helps build a pan–German identity in the wake of the country's 1989 reunification. The following two chapters focus on the myth of the American Dream through the Rocky franchise and a cluster of sports films that idealize small-town life in the United States. Importantly, Bonzel analyzes the entire Rocky series—from the 1976 debut to Creed 2 (dir. Steven Caple Jr., 2018)—to show how the iconic collection reinforces the American Dream narrative differently over time and as cultural circumstances change. Bonzel looks primarily to Hoosiers (dir. David Anspaugh, 1986) and Remember the Titans (dir. Boaz Yakin, 2000) to explain how sports films depict the small town as the ideal staging ground for the American Dream's realization. However, she argues that Coach Carter (dir. Thomas Carter, 2005) adapts the small-town mythos to an urban environment to authenticate its narrative of sporting uplift. Bonzel closes National Pastimes with a discussion of sports films that employ "Hero Others," or "female or homosexual athlete protagonists who threaten the conventional gender order" and, by extension, "present a threat to the perceived stability of the nation" (21). This chapter—perhaps the strongest of the book—uses films like...