And make no mistake—as depicted in Concussion, the NFL is an all-powerful entity that owns doctors and is more than willing to sacrifice its players on the gridiron, the true Sunday altar of the American masses. The majority of the story takes place in Pittsburgh, a city whose identity is so tied up with the Steelers that the team’s name is synonymous with the city’s industry. Numerous helicopter shots circling around Heinz Field, the new stadium the city built for the Steelers in 2001, have a magisterial quality that turns the massive edifice into a symbol of professional football’s seemingly insurmountable grip on the American imagination. To threaten football in any way—to dare suggest that America’s favorite sport is somehow dangerous, despite such an assertion being seemingly common sense given the fundamental violence of its play—is nothing less than un-American. Thus, it is ironic that the man who did precisely that wasn’t an American.

That man was Dr. Bennet Omalu (Will Smith), a Nigerian-born forensic pathologist who was working at the Allegheny County Coroner’s Office in Pittsburgh when he discovered and named the cumulative brain disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). From the very beginning, we are meant to see Dr. Omalu as different, and not just because of his nationality and his accent. A devout Catholic with a devoted work ethic and a particularly acute sensitivity toward his profession, he performs autopsies not as a postmortem procedure, but as a personal connection with the deceased, to whom he talks (he also refuses to reuse scalpels, knives, and saws on another body). His manner takes on an aura of the sacred, which turns his discovery of CTE into an almost sanctified act. When performing an autopsy on Mike “Iron Mike” Webster (David Morse), who played center for the Steelers for nearly 20 years, including their fabled run in the late 1970s when they won four Super Bowls, Omalu refuses to accept that he simply died of a heart attack. The beginning of the film shows us Webster suffering in a state of paranoid delusion—living out of his truck, losing his memory, and hearing voices. Omalu correctly recognizes that this is not usual behavior for a 50-year-old man, and when Webster’s brain appears normal during the autopsy, he orders additional tests at his own expense that eventually reveal what will become known as CTE.

That, of course, is just the beginning, as Omalu’s findings present a direct threat to the NFL and its own self-funded internal studies that demonstrated repeatedly that playing football has no significant adverse effects on the players’ brains (the NFL, in this regard, behaves very much like Big Tobacco, repeatedly asserting that its product poses no danger when common sense tells us that there is no way it doesn’t). It never occur to Omalu to do anything but speak the truth via his scientific findings in an effort to help the players who are suffering, and it is almost too perfect that his name is a shortened form of the surname Onyemalukwube, which means “if you know, speak.” That is precisely what he does, and it almost destroys him.

Omalu has a few allies, starting with Dr. Cyril Wecht (Albert Brooks), the sardonic chief pathologist at the Allegheny County Coroner’s Office who Omalu looks up to as a model of ethics and professionalism. Dr. Wecht is in many ways Omalu’s opposite—he is brash and sarcastic where Omalu is reserved and sincere—but they both share a passion for uncovering the truth in their work, which is why Wecht puts up with Omalu’s eccentric methods. Omalu eventually allies with Dr. Julian Bailes (Alec Baldwin), a neurosurgeon who worked as the Steelers chief doctor for many years and was therefore an important cog in the machine that worked so hard to ensure that no one questioned the safety of the sport. Bailes was a personal friend of Mike Webster’s, and he is one of the last people Webster sees before his untimely death, thus he work with Omalu as a kind of personal redemption, an opportunity for him to make amends for all the years he looked the other way.

Writer/director Peter Landesman, who began as a novelist and investigative reporter before making his directorial debut a few years ago with Parkland (2014), a drama about the chaos at the Parkland Hospital in Dallas after Kennedy was assassinated, approaches the story with a steadfastness and directness that is noble in its seriousness, even as it makes the film feel a bit cut-and-paste. Although Will Smith is the movie star headliner (and he gives a solid, movie-star-awards-bait performance, really his first since Seven Pounds back in 2008), Concussion spreads its narrative focus, mainly by giving us glimpses into the lives of other retired Steelers players who are suffering from CTE. Smith gets solid support from Baldwin and Brooks, the latter of whom provides comic relief without distracting from the film’s overall air of seriousness. Less effective is the subplot about Omalu’s growing relationship with Prema Mutiso (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), a recent Nigerian émigré who stays with him at the request of his priest and who eventually becomes his wife. The subplot is true to Omalu’s personal history, but it feels distracting to the overall flow of the story, perhaps because it fits too neatly into the “obligatory romance” slot.

Nevertheless, as a whole Concussion works very well, first drawing us into Omalu’s pursuit of understanding why these men are dying such terrible deaths at such early ages and then into his fight to get the NFL to recognize his research and stop covering up the dangers of professional football. Omalu becomes a target, and his life is very nearly ruined by the forces his research threatens, which makes America’s pastime—or at least those who profit the most from it—look like unmitigated bullies. Given Omalu’s overt Christianity, seeing Concussion as a David-versus-Goliath metaphor feels particularly apt, except that rather than slinging a stone, he slings a research article in a medical journal that carries with it the power to discredit an empire.

Copyright ©2016 James Kendrick

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