Eddie the Eagle

I loved this film. It was the best film out of all those I’ve seen this year, I think, pipping Zootopia only by a small margin, but I had a very strong emotional reaction to this film – I laughed and I cried, it was sad and sweet and funny and uplifting all at the same time, a proper ‘heart-warming British underdog film’ as the Mitchell & Webb sketch goes. I think I enjoyed it because in a time of doubt over my own dreams and future, it feels like validation to see the story of someone who wanted their dream so much that they achieved it against absolutely all the odds, in line with the true Olympic spirit. It wasn’t about winning, it was about competing, about living the dream even if that meant failing over and over and getting back up again.

The cinematography was amazing, I was really stunned by the shots they took of the ski jumps; they felt so close that I felt right in Eddie’s shoes flying along the slope and out into thin air, on dizzying heights, and the crashes were terrifying. As Channel 4’s show The Jump demonstrates, ski jumping is an incredibly dangerous sport for amateurs and at least four participants in the show have had to drop out from broken bones. Eddie’s indomitable spirit made him likeable right from the opening montage of him as a bespectacled child comically tumbling and screwing up every Olympic sport he wanted to compete in before he ran across ski jumping.

Hugh Jackman did a fantastic turn as the alcoholic former-champion roped in by Eddie’s refusal to give up into coaching him. I love Hugh Jackman as an actor and he was at his best in the film, from his uproariously funny coaching fail, almost a version of the infamous scene from How Harry Met Sally (he tries to explain the stages of a successful ski jump to Eddie using sex with Eddie’s favourite actress Bo Derek as a metaphor, complete with acting out facial expressions) to the sadness when he was trying to convince Eddie not to ‘sell himself short’ by going to the Olympics in 1988 instead of waiting four years with more training and ‘going as a contender’. I like how their friendship developed through Eddie’s persistence. I enjoyed that Jackman’s character, Bronson Peary, gets his own moment of redemption when his own former coach apologises to him at the end, saying he had been wrong to write Bronson off as someone who didn’t take ski jumping seriously enough.

The relationship that Eddie had with his parents in the film – his father doubting, his mother assisting him subversively in his goals – compares to Judy’s in Zootopia, and both films have the same theme of working hard to achieve your dreams, even when you’re doubted and your abilities are questioned. Eddie was a raw amateur, facing impossible odds, and he kept picking himself up and dusting himself off, and that was the endearing quality, that was what made me cry when he failed to qualify at the last competition before the Olympics that would have allowed him to participate: his contained grief in telling his parents he was giving up. And then I cried again at his joy when the German judges decided to score his practice jump instead of the actual competition jump, because that bending of the rules gave him his shot, and although he came last in the Olympics at Calgary he set world records for British ski jumpers and showed how valuable pluck and courage are.