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Olympic goad

Without Limits goes the distance

by Peter Keough

*** WITHOUT LIMITS Directed and written by Robert Towne. With Billy Crudup, Donald Sutherland, Monica Potter, Lisa Banes, Jeremy Sisto, Matthew Lillard, and Dean Norris. A Warner Bros. Films release. At Framingham.

Why Steve Prefontaine? Some will remember him as a loser in an Olympic competition epitomizing the meaninglessness of sport -- he failed to place in the 10,000 meters during the 1972 Munich Olympics, an event rendered moot by the massacre of the Israeli team by Palestinian terrorists. Others will commemorate him as the perennial athlete dying young -- while training for a return in the 1976 Montreal games, he died in a car crash, at the age of 26. Nonetheless, two major movies have been released in the past year celebrating his brief story. The latest and best (1997's Prefontaine was a pedestrian effort) is Robert Towne's rigorous, wearying, triumphant Without Limits.

Why Towne was drawn to Prefontaine is not so mysterious. From his screenplays of Chinatown, The Last Detail, and Shampoo to his directorial efforts Greystoke and Personal Best, he has been fascinated with the plight of innocence and purity caught up in a corrupt system. In Steve Prefontaine (played by an unrecognizable Billy Crudup, who looks like a young, blond Dennis Eckersley) -- an arrogant force of nature whose credo of all-out effort proved problematic in a sport hemmed in by tactics, politics, and commercialism -- he finds an icon worthy of his preoccupation. Vivid and opaque, Towne's Limits offers little insight into the psychology of the man, instead transforming him into an emblem of the universal impulse for excellence and immortality and their tragic unattainability.

The runner is first seen on a TV set at the beginning of his unsuccessful Munich effort, and Towne counters that slick, superficial image with one more archetypical: the young Prefontaine, Forrest Gump-like, pursued by bullies and easily outdistancing them. That experience, it is suggested, motivated the runner's lifelong compulsion for "front-runnerism," a tendency rued by his coach at the University of Oregon, Bill Bowerman (an avuncular Donald Sutherland). Not so idealistic, Bowerman keeps his team's feet on the ground. Literally: he personally measures them and fits them with his homemade running shoes, their soles cooked up out of latex on the family waffle iron. He's a master of calculation, of shaving off seconds through craft and manipulation, subterfuges that Prefontaine disdains as tainting the integrity of individual performance.

The conflict in Without Limits, then, is more philosophical than dramatic -- Prefontaine's Dionysian will versus Bowerman's Apollonian wile. This limits the film's emotional impact, and yet it adds thematic depth and resonance. For much of the movie, Prefontaine seems to have the right idea as he destroys the competition in a series of college competitions filmed by Towne with all the sweat, pain, and animal grace of his Personal Best -- though with little of that film's voyeurism toward female Olympians.

Gradually, however, a certain pathology emerges in Prefontaine's ethos. In one telling sequence, he engages in some gymnastic sex before a big meet (bemusedly observed by the fundamentalist team member assigned to chaperone him) and brutally cuts his foot (Freudian castration-anxiety alert). The next day he insists on running anyway, and the bloodily excruciating victory evokes not so much the triumph of the human spirit as a masochistic celebration of the weakness of the flesh.

Similarly, Prefontaine's love life indicates that his need to break the bonds of physical limitation conceals an inability to open to the possibilities of intimacy. A big man on the Oregon campus, he woos pretty co-ed Mary Marckx (Monica Potter) with one of the pairs of running shoes he gets free from promotion-seeking manufacturers. His ploy fizzles when she notices that half the co-eds on the quad are wearing the same, but Prefontaine perseveres, undismayed by the strictures that Mary's Catholicism places on sex. Or maybe that's part of the appeal: though it's the height of the sexual revolution and he has the charisma of a rock star, somehow self-abnegation, even self-annihilation, seems closer to his heart.

Towne doesn't offer much in the way of background to explain his character's character -- just the flashback to the pursuing bullies, and a glimpse of Prefontaine's flinty, disapproving, German-immigrant mother. But Crudup's performance, both vulnerable and haughty and marked by a jaunty fatalism, gives credence to his pronouncements that he will win because he can stand more pain than anyone else, that for him running is an art.

There he and Bowerman seem to agree; as the coach announces to his team, running is an absurdity, and thus a good preparation for the absurdity of life. Few embraced both absurdities with such Olympian fervor as Steve Prefontaine. That he died young and Bowerman lived on to develop Nike running shoes only confirms the art and the absurdity. Prefontaine belongs to a realm where myths are more than just logos on footwear, and Towne's film gives him proper homage.