The list of movies based on video games is unfortunately long and undistinguished. From the original 1993 Super Mario Bros. production to 1995’s Mortal Kombat, on through Lara Croft and Resident Evil, and all the way to yet another Super Mario Bros. movie earlier this year, game franchises can’t seem to help themselves when it comes to dramatizing their various bits and pixels on the big screen.
But this year has seen a welcomed change to the formula: instead of cinematically retelling the game’s plot, filmmakers have started telling the stories of how popular games were created and of the people who made them possible. They’re telling the story of the games themselves, not the stories found within the games.
This year has already seen two such films. The first was the surprisingly agreeable Tetris, and the second is a lighthearted and loving look at the world of rubber flippers, blinking lights, and small silver spheres. Yes, someone made a movie about pinball, and it’s nearly as fun as the game itself.
Pinball: The Man Who Saved the Game may not involve international Cold War conspiracies like Tetris does, but it does offer a rather sweetly comedic look at the game’s history, specifically that it was banned in New York and many other states up until 1976. As I came to learn, pinball used to be illegal, and it took the efforts of a young enthusiast named Roger Sharpe to change all that.
Directors Austin and Meredith Bragg bring this story to life by first posing it as a faux-documentary, with veteran character actor Dennis Boutsikaris playing a present-day Sharpe as a talking head, then using his words to flashback to the 1970s, where Mike Faist dons the most impressive mustache this side of Sam Elliot to play the younger version. This back and forth mostly works, even if Boutsikaris can’t help himself from some unnecessary overdramatizing.
The battle for pinball’s legality culminates in a “good vs. evil” hearing at city hall, at which Sharpe cleverly and somewhat sarcastically demonstrates that pinball is not a game of chance but one of skill (at some point in the game’s history, government officials had gotten it into their heads that pinball was created to cheat children out of their hard-earned lunch money and lead them down a slippery slope of vice and sin) by expertly playing game after game on a machine that was literally carted into the courtroom.
As the reluctant hero, Faist walks the line between professional and completely nerdy so well that it’s impossible not to root for him, his fight to save pinball, and the burgeoning romance that develops between him and his future wife Ellen (a charming and pragmatic Crystal Reed). In fact, where love angles often feel shoehorned into stories that cover larger issues, this one is anything but. Sure, it has the third-act estrangement just where it’s supposed to, and the inevitable make-up is right on time, but who cares? The whole story, from top to bottom, is so damned wholesome that it would be disingenuous to present it any other way.
Admittedly, the exact nature of pinball’s legal status is a pretty low-stakes affair in the grand scheme of the social upheaval of the late 1970s, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any stakes at all. In telling Sharpe’s story, the brothers Bragg also weave in the financial dire straits of the leading pinball manufacturers of the time (you’ll recognize many of their names, even if you didn’t realize you knew them), and in doing so, peripherally touch on how many employees and factory workers rely on the game’s availability. At a glance, Pinball might seem silly or superfluous, but underneath its nonchalance lies a declining industry in need of saving. And that’s a story worth telling.
James is a writer, skateboarder, record collector, wrestling nerd, and tabletop gamer living with his family in Asheville, North Carolina. He is a member of the Southeastern Film Critics Association, the North Carolina Film Critics Association, and contributes to The Daily Orca, Razorcake Magazine, Mountain Xpress, and Asheville Movies.