Concussion

Peter Landesman keeps almost everything at the autopsy table, the microscope and the meeting room; the football is brief and distant. At the centre is Bennet Omalu, a Nigerian born forensic pathologist, and the film weighs his standing as an immigrant as heavily as the finding itself: how he sounds at an institution’s door is part of the case. The starting point was Game Brain, Jeanne Marie Laskas’s 2009 article in GQ. Shooting happened where the events did: Omalu performed Mike Webster’s autopsy in 2002 at the Allegheny County coroner’s office in Pittsburgh, and the film was made there from late 2014, in real places such as the Braddock Carnegie Library and a Hill District church. Will Smith met Omalu before filming. Emails from the Sony breach showed the script worked over so as not to antagonise the league; Sony answered that nothing had been softened to placate anyone, and Landesman said the changes stripped out invented material. Smith took a Golden Globe nomination for best actor in a drama. The Academy named the film in nothing. A good fit if you can sit with the slow business of getting a finding accepted: publication, objection, pressure to retract. Not for anyone expecting the film to name and date the league’s own conduct; that side is measured.