Love all! Wimbledon, the delightfully predictable tennis romcom at age 20 | Movies

WWhen the average player thinks of tennis, the sport’s legends immediately come to mind: the revolutionary power and style of Serena Williams; Djokovic’s irreverent behavior on and off the court; and, closer to home, Hewitt’s insistence on celebrating a winning point by doing a tte-tte between himself and a puppet.

Peter Colt, the bumbling protagonist of Richard Loncraine’s 2004 romantic comedy Wimbledon, played by Paul Bettany, isn’t a household name. For most of ’96, he was ranked No. 11 in the world, but now he’s an unseeded, washed-up 31-year-old grappling with his inevitable descent into obscurity. Before reluctantly accepting a role as tennis director of a private club (full of lascivious older ladies), he’s about to play his last Wimbledon.

There’s a whiff of an original story about what happens to great but not quite legendary professional athletes in this film that came out 20 years before Luca Guadagnino’s sexy dramedy Challengers . Few of us will ever flirt as close to glory as Peter, but most of us can identify with the eventual need to neutralize our once-lofty childhood aspirations, accept our station in life and, ideally, realize that performance alone doesn’t determine one’s worth in the world. Wimbledon is a much more conventional offering about (don’t worry, there’s no way to spoil this one) the potential of love to transform a mediocre underdog into a champion.

A classic meet-cute mix-up sees Peter stumble into the wrong hotel room of tennis’s American enfant terrible, Lizzie Bradbury, played with verve by Kirsten Dunst, freshly showered and without tennis whites. She welcomes the intrusion. Peter manages to come up with a ridiculous, Can I say good body-luck! Shit! on the way out, which she finds inexplicably endearing, and which sparks an unlikely romance.

With Wimbledon lasting just over a respectable 90 minutes, the speed and intensity of Peter and Lizzie’s courtship is astonishing. A British accent, a bundle of fish and chips, and a slap to the smooth face from Lizzie’s archetypal jock ex-boyfriend is seemingly all Peter needs to win the heart of the baddest bitch in the game.

Thankfully, the film fills in the gaps with perfectly cute montages of the couple walking arm in arm to David Gray's This Years Love or escaping the paparazzi for a spontaneous mid-tournament trip to the seaside. (At Wimbledon, an athlete's presumably grueling schedule can be stretched to include any number of frivolities, from a long, romantic run on cement in Converse sneakers to a bottle of red with the family on the eve of a career-defining match.)

To be fair, maybe the film's writers wanted a quirky Dennis Rodman-party-in-Vegas or Ben Cousins-running-from-the-cops approach to professional sportsmanship.

But Wimbledon’s joy lies in surrendering to a universe in which extraordinary things happen to unremarkable people, even if they can’t muster the strength to try very hard. Once you’ve embraced the film’s reassuring predictability and refusal to sit with the narrative tension, there’s so much to enjoy: Peter’s Fred Perry sports jacket; not one but two Sugababes songs; stylish tennis scenes overseen by Australian great Pat Cash; and witty lines like Love means nothing in tennis: zero. It just means you lose.

Perhaps most relevantly, if you're struggling to accept your own mediocrity, Wimbledon encourages you to hold on to your bleak reality for a moment and cling to your delusions of grandeur a little longer.

Who knows? Maybe this is the year you finally find the girl of your dreams and conquer your own personal Wimbledon.

• Wimbledon is available to stream on Apple TV+ in Australia, and on Paramount+ in the UK and US. For more recommendations of what to stream in Australia, click here