Will Smith enlightened by playing ‘Concussion’ doctor

What Omalu ended up doing was discovering a disease – CTE, or Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, that is leading to an understanding of what’s happening to football players, and mental illness triggered by physical injury to the brain. The NFL’s concussion scandal rocked the sport, and led to its commissioner testifying in front of Congress. All those shots to the head, all those concussions-acknowledged or, frequently, not-have created a class of ex-players struggling with depression, erratic behavior, and memory loss.

The NFL attacked the study, and the Nigerian-born Omalu feared deportation. He portrays him as a caring and determined man, an outsider who is able to see things as they are because he’s not beholden to the religion of football.

One of Landesman’s most understated, hence most effective, choices is to have Omalu observe without comment a regular weekly “Monday Night Football” segment in which announcers would celebrate especially devastating usages of heads as battering rams under the title, “Jacked Up”. The one player we get to know is Mike Webster (a padded and make-up covered David Morse), an all-pro Steelers centre who ended up dying of complications from dementia at age 50. (Luke Wilson has a brief moment as NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, presiding over a committee hearing.) In the midst of an ongoing debate, Concussion takes a side, but it’s not bullheaded, nor is it fearful. “I didn’t see this film as taking on the NFL”.

“Families and parents need to know that when you play this game the way it is being played today that there is a significant risk that you will damage your brain, and that it will manifest sometimes years, decades, up to 40 years later”, Omalu told AFP in an interview. Long’s brain looked much like Webster’s. The cause of death was football, according to the film “Concussion”. There is also a love story. He tosses in unusual noises in the night, suspicious cars parked outside the doctor’s apartment and a mysterious vehicle tailing the doctor’s wife (Gugu Mbatha-Raw).

“Once I got to high school and started playing football we heard a lot about him”, said Rhinelander High School teacher Jim Moore. There is no way that a man being threatened with legal action comes close to being as powerful as a person being driven to suicide as a means of escaping his painful state. “They have concussion protocols and they let players talk about it. I think the problem is there’s a very limited range of things they can actually do”. As The New York Times noted in its piece about Concussion and the Sony hack, the company is nearly alone among Hollywood studios in having no financial ties to the National Football League… and I think that shows here.