Murderball

Dir: Henry Alex Rubin, Dana Adam Shapiro

2005

****

I think Murderball can be best described by one of the lines from the film; “We’re not going for a hug. We’re going for a fucking gold medal”. Henry Alex Rubin and Dana Adam Shapiro’s sports film is an unsweetened and brutally honest look at wheelchair rugby, the players and more specifically the rivalry between the Canadian and U.S. teams leading up to the 2004 Paralympic Games. It was the first time the Paralympic Games really popped up on my radar and when the Paralympics came to London in 2012 this was the first sport I made sure I got a ticket for. It’s brutal stuff. Rugby is a rough sport anyway but watching someone get knocked out of a wheelchair for the first time is shocking – made even more so by the fact that they have to get back in the chair unassisted and carry on. The players take it in their stride though and for many they represent the spirit of the Paralympic games. In Murderball some of the players explain how they became to be in a wheelchair, while others don’t deem it important. I have sympathy for them – particularly Jeff Zupan who fell asleep in his friends flat-bed truck only for his friend to drive off in it drunk and crash into a river, trowing Zupan from the vehicle and making him paraplegic at age sixteen – but none of the players ask for it. They all have their demons, and maybe that’s what keeps them going and pushes them forward but mostly they don’t want to be seen as any different to anyone else. The determination is viewed from various different levels depending on the players. They are tough and the best at what they do – Murderball is just as difficult as Rugby and warrants just as much skill, its just played slightly differently. This means that the film isn’t quite about disabilities in the way you might think, rather that those with disabilities are really no different to anyone else. The film is about the sport, the competition, the passion and the pure violence. This isn’t about people with disabilities doing their best, this is about people with disabilities being great, this is about real sportsmen and real competition. The final showdown is pretty spectacular and is the sort of thing any documentary maker could only dream of capturing. The rivalry is intense with a lot of politics involved. You couldn’t write this sort of thing and I expect a dramatization to be made of it any day now but it still won’t quite be the same as watching it as it happened. There are some great characters involved in both teams but I never felt as if anyone was putting on a show for the cameras. Henry Alex Rubin and Dana Adam Shapiro’s film was nominated for many awards and it won most of them but the truth is they struck gold. They really only had to point and shoot the camera and edit it all together. This film is really all about editing thousands of hours of brilliant footage into a ninety minute feature. It’s not really the sort of brilliance you’d expect from an MTV movie. It’s a great film about sports, overcoming the odds and success over adversity but without any of the sugarcoating or forced emotional manipulation. The admiration comes naturally as does the fly-on-the-wall documentary style of filming. It’s an exceptional documentary.