It was 2009 and the beginning of a personal and professional mission.
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“Individuals with CTE usually experience cognitive problems – memory lapses or behavioral symptoms like depression and irritability”, she says.
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I became the only rapper that didn’t curse in his music. “On top of that, it was this incredible drama that was wrapped in an important social issue”.
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Since then, Omalu, who grew up in civil war-torn Nigeria, has learned plenty about football and – with the help of Webster’s damaged brain – became the first physician to make the connection between head injuries that players have endured and a nightmarish, degenerative brain disease now known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy [CTE].
Writer-director Peter Landesman (Parkland) lays all this out strictly by the numbers, with Omalu and a couple of other doctors (played by Alec Baldwin and Albert Brooks) representing moral conviction and just about everybody else embodying sleazy corporate (or corporate-beholden) evasiveness.
By any medical standards, CTE is a relatively newly discovered phenomena and it is fair to debate what exactly it is and how much it can be caused by football. “You’re two feet away”. Will Smith stars as a Nigerian-born coroner who just wants to do the right thing in “Concussion”. “He was not only sort of suppressed by the National Football League and powers that be, but he was really run out of town and written out of the story”. The NFL’s lead negotiators say that since the science regarding CTE is in the early stages, there is no hard proof that it is actually caused by football.
While Omalu’s trenchant views have run into predictable opposition from advocates and fans of America’s most-watched pastime, he insists he is neither anti-football nor anti-sport.
Focusing on the doctor means the story has a slow burn. But those scenes tend to slow the film, not enhance it. Were this a football game, you’d treat the courtship as if it were a tire ad – fast-forwarding through it to get back to the action.
In late summer of 2013, he spoke with an executive at Ridley Scott’s production company about the project. Wolthoff was particularly excited to have a film that could “try to effect positive change”.
Producer David Wolthoff identified the potential for the magazine story to launch a movie, and it then was championed by Giannina Scott, an actress turned producer married to filmmaker Ridley Scott. The screenplay frequently puts Omalu and Prema out in the cold in front of lousy scenery pondering their solemn predicament; do they ever talk about anything besides Omalu’s convictions?
“Dr. Omalu is a really interesting, paradoxical creature, you know”, Smith said.
Soon Sony was involved.
“Concussion” ends up feeling more like a vanity project for Smith, as a way of garnering another Oscar nomination. “Seeing the thing all come together was just magical”. More than anything, that’s what this film is about, and that’s the hope of the filmmakers: that at a minimum, people will open up to knowing. One had been crying.
And that’s a strong argument for any football lover (or parent of one) to see this film, which is anchored by a sensitive, understated performance by Will Smith as the real-life forensic pathologist who earned the NFL’s animosity for shining a torch on the problem in Pittsburgh, home of the revered Steelers. Alec Baldwin managed to nail a southern accent as Louisiana-boy, Dr. Julian Bailes, in ways that The Walking Dead can’t even match. “God did not intended for us to play football”, Omalu warns, and you may wonder if this conclusion was found in his slides or delivered by heavenly emissary.
This movie and the doctor are not without controversy. I find the growth of the NFL’s tolerance for criticism disturbing and the response to the film itself only seeks to justify the message that the film holds, which is one hell of a message.
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“This is petty semantics by scientists who are jockeying for position, who want credit and are parsing words and parsing the meaning of what it means to discover and to name something”, said Laskas, who added that her book “Concussion” details all the scientific literature and lays out Omalu’s place in the discoveries. Long’s brain looked much like Webster’s.
