I wish Breaking Olympia: The Phil Heath Story had been Breaking Down Olympia instead. You know, give us an insight into the so-called sport of bodybuilding, so that we may understand why the people who practice it and watch it enjoy it so much — because, to me, it was and remains a fucking mystery.
The subject of the documentary, seven-time Mr. Olympia winner Phil ‘The Gift’ Heath, can’t figure out why “on ESPN, we see cup stacking” instead of bodybuilding; then again, he lives in a fantasy world where, he claims, in countries “that don’t have the big three — baseball, football, basketball — bodybuilding is king.” Sorry to burst your little bubble, but countries that don’t have the “big three” still have the ‘big one;’ i.e., soccer.
I’m not a big soccer fan, but I can grasp the rules and mechanics of it. Conversely, I don’t see any difference between an allegedly athletic competition like the Olympia and a popularity contest like Miss Universe other than the latter sets out to reward beauty, while the former celebrates grotesqueness.
I can appreciate the symmetry, but the rest is positively baroque-run-amok. We’re told that this shit “requires a huge amount of discipline,” but all I see is unrestrained excess.
There’s, for instance, the “nutritional aspect,” which retired bodybuilder Jay Cutler describes as “extreme eating, extreme dieting, extreme physique.” That’s not a sport; that an eating disorder with a twist of dysmorphophobia.
The physiques are extreme all right; muscle bulging upon muscle, veins damn near popping, plastic-textured skin — a veritable sausage fest in more ways than one; these guys aren’t figurative dicks (well, maybe they are; who knows), but they certainly look like anthropomorphic, fully engorged, walking erections.
I guess that makes Heath the biggest dick of them all, which incidentally is more of a parameter than the movie gives us. I don’t know why he wins when he does any more than why he loses when he does. Is it a point system? And if so, are the competitors awarded or deducted points?
We hear about judges but have no idea what they’re judging. We learn that “Everybody has a different style” but are kept in the dark as to what those styles might be. “Back double, back lat spread, most muscular, side chest, side tri.” What do any of those things mean?
Similarly, there is apparently a lot of “hard work and sacrifice” involved just to make it to Olympia, but it’s all mostly taken for granted. I’d be curious to find out what bodybuilders are forced to give up except their “social life.”
As for the “grueling workouts,” we get plenty of shots of Heath in the gym, but that means nothing without a context. There’s no cause-and-effect relationship to Heath’s regime (inasmuch as it can be called that from the evidence on display); no ‘I need to work on A so I’m going to do B expecting to achieve C as a result.’
Heath inadvertently reveals just how shallow the whole endeavor is when he talks about a book “called The Precontest Bible”: “So they would tell you, like, on what day they trained, what did they train … Basically giving up all the secrets.”
That sounds promising; tell me more. Heath: “Like one of the questions is [reads] ‘The thing I like least about contest prep is…’ He said, ‘Nothing. I really don’t mind the diet or training.’” Such riveting, enlightening stuff!
Who “he” is or what his training and diet consist of (other than presumably “spend[ing] seven hours a day eating;” or is it “eating seven times a day”? The film can’t even get its story straight on that) stays a secret.
This laidback approach (which I’d expect in a narrative film like Stay Hungry, not in a documentary) will seem confusingly arbitrary to a neophyte, which leads me to believe that writer/director Brett Harvey is preaching exclusively to the choir. Either that or he expected us to be blown away by the sheer oddity of this bizarre spectacle; alas, the sight of a bunch of musclebound freaks seemingly trying to turn themselves inside out don’t impress much (shoutout to Shania Twain).
The human element is equally superficial. The movie wastes too much time on the David Copperfield kind of crap, and it isn’t even Dickensian enough to warrant anything beyond a cursory glance.
Heath himself appears to realize how dumb it was for him to want to kill himself just because he went from a big basketball star in high school to a small fish in a big pond in college.
“How shitty would it be if my parents would have to read in a newspaper that … their son … took his own life because of a game,” he rightfully observes, only to ruin it by adding, “I didn’t have the courage to just acknowledge that life isn’t fair.”
First of all, blaming the unfairness of life takes the opposite of courage. Second, how exactly was life unfair to you? You got “a full-ride scholarship to a Division 1 program,” for fuck’s sake.
Heath goes on, “I’d had it with the lies and the politics of playing for these coaches that [sic] don’t give a fuck about you.” What do you mean, specifically, by “lies and politics”? In what way did those coaches not give a fuck about you? Either put your money where your mouth is or quit your bellyaching.
That’s nothing more than a crock of woe-is-me bullshit to cover up the fact that Heath just wasn’t good enough to justify his scholarship (and even when he was “no longer a student athlete,” he was still a student; that is, he still had a chance at a higher education; never mind that what his major was, or if he even graduated, is another unaddressed question mark), and indeed he keeps coming across as more lucky than good.
Like Vince Carter, Phil Heath was doomed to live in uninteresting times, and his life story as depicted in this documentary (not exactly a hagiography, though you nevertheless get the feeling that they left the proverbial warts out) is too uneventful to command undivided attention. He’s always at or near the top, and that gives his career the shape of a flat line.
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