No limits to Sutherland's warmth, depth

by Marke Andrews
Vancouver Sun

I'm no expert on distance running, but I know a thing or two about baseball. One of the best non-fiction books about baseball is Pat Jordan's A False Spring, which is not about overcoming odds and achieving success, but about having everything at your fingertips and failing.

Without Limits, the much-delayed new film by writer-director Robert Towne, also eschews the Rocky, chump-conquers-all ideal. This biopic of '70s distance runner Steve Prefontaine has many scenes of triumph, but it adds dimension in showing the protagonist losing the biggest race of his life.

Prefontaine was a cocky Oregon kid whose style was to race out front and stay there.  He was recruited by the University of Oregon's famous coach, Bill Bowerman, who tried to get him to run a more conventional race -- holding back and spurting at the end.  Prefontaine smashed U.S. records to pieces, then went to the 1972 Munich Olympics and finished fourth. Three years later, while training for the 1976 Montreal games, he died in a car wreck. He was 24.

Towne, who co-wrote the screenplay with Prefontaine's old friend Kenny Moore, focuses on the runner's go-for-it style and on his relationship with Bowerman. An early flashback to childhood establishes that Prefontaine (played by Billy Crudup) ran ahead of the pack out of fear; he was regularly chased by bullies. Bowerman (Donald Sutherland) reinforces this point after seeing him race: "He always wanted to run out front, like he was trying to get away from something."

Bowerman, a tender but firm father figure, tries to teach Prefontaine a more classic style and, when the runner resists, it's the old coach who learns to change. It's an uneasy detente, and at one of the country's biggest track meets, Bowerman turns his back on his best runner every time Prefontaine looks his way.

Theirs is a dance of wills, a kind of game between friends, and the two combatants have too much respect for one another to let it become divisive. As Bowerman tells Prefontaine: "You like to disturb me, Pre."

Ironically, when Prefontaine does adopt his coach's advice at the Munich Olympics, it results in the worst loss -- and one of the most heroic races -- of his life.

The film relies on standard sports-movie techniques -- slow-motion sequences, chanting crowds, sound vacuums for key moments -- but it doesn't dwell on the agony and the ecstasy of competition. The side routes are far too interesting for Towne to remain on the track.

          One of those avenues involves Prefontaine's fight against the hypocrisy of the Amateur Athletic Union, which manipulated athletes while making money off them. Another side road takes in the romance between Prefontaine and Mary Marckx (Monica Potter), a straight-arrow Catholic girl with whom he was badly mismatched. And there was the utter devastation all athletes felt as politics intruded into the Munich Games when terrorists murdered 11 members of the Israeli Olympic team.

Perhaps the greatest accomplishment of Without Limits is the liberation of Donald Sutherland. Long stuck in B-movies playing demented or neurotic characters, Sutherland gets to stretch, portraying a man of warmth, depth and intellect. Without even speaking, Sutherland conveys his character's thoughts with the simplest of facial expressions.