Without Limits . Newcity Chicago . 11-02-98

Without Limits

DIRECTED BY: Robert Towne

REVIEWED: 11-02-98

The athlete's glory story - with its triangulated relationship between the sage-like but bruised coach, the worrisome girlfriend and the cocky, but golden, athlete (remember "Good Will Hunting"?) - is revived in the true tale of runner Steve Prefontaine, with mostly exhilarating results. Never have the seventies looked so good. Far from being exploited for nostalgia, the currents of the decade - not its shaggy mustaches and disillusionment, but its itchy-sweet physicality - are as much a part of the story as running. When coach Bill Bauerman (a canned but enjoyable Donald Sutherland) advises Pre to tuck his pelvis under as he runs, he leans in and whispers "like at the deepest moment of penetration." As Prefontaine, a renegade front-runner who chose to burn up his resources rather than taint his race with strategy, Billy Crudup is luminous. He's irresistible to every one except fawn-faced co-ed Mary, who, amid the sexually liberating seventies, clings to her own set of unpopular values about bodily integrity. Pre's hubris is his belief that winning is really only a matter of wanting it badly enough. The classical struggle of physical endurance to match those spiritual ideals culminates in the 1972 Berlin Olympics, where notorious events both on and off the track express the all too human extent of our limits. It's all very sentimental (obligatory trumpets, slow motion) but the intimate milieu in which the characters make their choices is still touching from way up here in the nineties, where sport is a commercial enterprise and sexuality potentially lethal.

--Ellen Fox

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Without Limits

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