Roger Federer is arguably the greatest men’s tennis player who has ever lived, and walking away from a career like his couldn’t have been easy. Federer: Twelve last days, a new feature-length documentary streaming on Prime Video, follows the greats through those final moments of glory on the court. Considered a “home movie that was never intended to be seen by the public,” the documentary combines footage of what happens with retrospective interviews of the legend and his contemporaries.
FEDERER: TWELVE LAST DAYS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The essence: The press releases of Federer: Twelve last days presents the film as “a home movie that was never intended to be seen by the public,” and believe it or not, it gives you a stylistic idea of what’s to come. It’s a lot of seemingly lightly edited reality show-style footage as a camera crew follows Federer, interspersed with interviews from the man himself, as well as other greats and sometimes rivals Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic and Andy Murray.
What movies will it remind you of?: It is difficult to talk about a great athlete who leaves it without thinking about The last Dance, though this doesn’t have the career-spanning approach that that sprawling documentary series had. A closer parallel might be the Conor McGregor documentary. McGregor forever, which saw the famous wrestler grappling with the potential of the end of his career, but even that’s not quite right. More than anything, it reminded me of a book: Geoff Dyer’s. The last days of Roger Federeritself a meandering set of meditations on endings that came to light a few months before Federer’s retirement in 2022.
Performance worth seeing: It’s hard to imagine you’d be watching anyone other than Roger Federer, but the presence of his few true peers (Andy Murray, Novak Djokovic and, most importantly, Rafael Nadal) is the best part of Federer: Twelve last days.
Memorable dialogue: There’s plenty to choose from, but the most jarring and memorable might be the beginning, when Federer introduces himself to the camera by saying, “I’m Roger Federer and I was a professional tennis player for over 24 years.” That’s just how it was… it still doesn’t sound right, even now, almost two years after he hung up on it. He explains: “Sometimes us players don’t like that word ‘retirement’, it feels like the end of everything… the line is drawn, you’re a completely different person and every day is going to be different… and I wanted to make sure it wasn’t like that.”
Sex and skin: None. Did you come to this looking for him? That’s up to you, friend.
Our opinion: In his 2018 stand-up special Magnificent boy at Radio CityComedian John Mulaney talks about meeting Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger backstage at Saturday night live.
“All my friends were like ‘is it nice?’ No! Or maybe it is, because of his version of life. Because he has a very different life. This is Mick Jagger. That’s his name! He has played stadiums with 20,000 people cheering him on like he was a god for fifty years. That should change you as a person. If you do that for fifty years, you’ll never again say, ‘Does anyone have a laptop charger I can borrow?’
Yes, I’m off topic here, but I couldn’t help but think about this part while watching Federer: twelve days to go, a documentary film purporting to be a “home movie” that was not originally intended for public release. I find it hard to believe that an athlete who has been on an echelon of success and fame that perhaps – generously – a dozen other people have reached in a generation would do anything that is not carefully organized and crafted for public consumption.
(The first things that come to mind: Serena Williams, Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo, Tom Brady, Tiger Woods, LeBron James… I don’t know, does it get difficult after that?)
This sense that we’re not really seeing the real Roger Federer comes through in one of the first scenes in which he prepares to publicly announce his retirement. It’s a moment the sporting world has speculated about for more than a decade, and it’s something that could make for great drama, but quickly devolves into unnecessary name-dropping, with a member of Federer’s team answering a phone call. from “her biggest fan,” legendary Vogue editor Anna Wintour. It feels forced, but then, like the Mulaney part, maybe it’s true to her version of life. Watching it, I couldn’t help but feel that they were putting me like in an episode of house hunterswhere a couple is forced to pretend they didn’t buy the house they’ve been ‘looking at’ months ago.
This does not mean that Federer: Twelve last days Does not have merit. For one thing, it’s mercifully sparse in career hindsight. Too many documentaries focused on athletes (and there are many these days) feel the need to run through Batman’s entire origin story arc every time. We don’t need a bunch of footage of a teenage Federer talking about what it was like growing up in Switzerland dreaming of playing tennis; This is a film that came to talk about the end of his career, and it largely sticks to that task. This narrow focus gives the proceedings a pace that ranges from elegiac at best to funereal at worst, but it doesn’t degrade the viewer into a Wikipedia entry about his career.
Counterintuitively, the moments where it most feels like we’re seeing the real Roger Federer are the ones where they’re most likely to have been managed by multiple teams of PR professionals. Those are the moments when he interacts with the few people who could reasonably be described as his “peers,” fellow tennis greats Bjorn Borg, John McEnroe, Andy Murray, Novak Djokovic and the man to whom he was most frequently compared during his career. career. , rival of Rafael Nadal. These moments, no matter how planned, come closest to offering a window into a version of life that will never seem normal if you haven’t lived it.
Our call: SKIP IT. If you are a big Federer fan, Federer: Twelve last days It will surely make you sentimental and maybe even entertain you, but it won’t give you the long-awaited window into the man’s soul that you might have hoped for.
Scott Hines, editor of the much-loved Action Cookbook Newsletter,is an architect, blogger, and expert internet user living in Louisville, Kentucky.
