Movie Review : Ronaldo The Movie
Ronaldo The Movie
Director : Anthony Wonke
Producer : James Gay-Rees, Asif Kapadia, Paul Martin
Distributed by : Universal Picture
Starring : Cristiano Ronaldo, Maria Dolores, Hugo, Jorge Mendes, Lionel Messi, and Cristiano Jr
Languange : English and Portuguese
Watch the movie trailer here
Ronaldo is a 2015 British documentary film directed by Anthony
Wonke. It follows the life and career of Portuguese footballer Cristiano
Ronaldo, who currently plays for Spanish club Real Madrid and the Portugal
national team. The trailer
for the film was released on 28 September 2015 and was released worldwide on 9 November 2015. Famous players and managers such as Radamel Falcao, Ro Ferdinand, Jose Mourinho, Gary Neville, and former coach of Ronaldo at Manchester United and also his "father" in football, Sir Alex Ferguson was attended at the movie premiere in London's Leicester Square.
Directed by Anthony Wonke and executive-produced by Asif
Kapadia, Ronaldo was shot over the course of 14 months with the
film-makers gaining access to Ronaldo's private life and inner circle of
friends, family and team-mates. The film was shot in Madeira, Ronaldo's
birthplace, Lisbon, where he began his professional career with Sporting CP,
and Madrid, where he currently resides as a squad member of Real Madrid.
Ronaldo himself announced the film's production on Twitter on 9 June 2015,
posting a picture of his son, Cristiano Jr., behind a camera along with the
announcement.
Here's the review :
As a snapshot of what life must be like for Cristiano Ronaldo, there is one clip when his godson is being baptised and there is a small gathering around
the font. The baby’s head has just been wet when the priest looks over
to the tanned guy with the gelled hair and whips out a mobile phone.
“Any chance of a quick selfie?” he wants to know.
Then there is the moment Portugal’s team are training at Estádio
Moisés Lucarelli in São Paulo during the last World Cup and a sobbing
girl breaks the cordon to run across the pitch in a desperate attempt to
reach her hero. She is shaking, crying, close to hysteria and caught by
one of the security guards. It is The Beatles at Shea Stadium all over
again. Ronaldo hugs her and she looks as if she might pass out. “He
knows I exist,” she wails, when a television reporter stops her a few
moments later. What did he say? “He asked me to stay calm and stop
crying.” And what did you say back? “I asked him to follow me on
Twitter.”
It must be suffocating at times even if, for the most part, Ronaldo
gives the impression that fame is his comfort blanket. The film is a
remarkable vanity project and, even more than before, it is difficult
not to come away with the feeling that Ronaldo must shout his own name
during sex. He and his agent, Jorge Mendes, appear to have a
relationship of mutual worship. Mendes, Ronaldo says, is “the best, the Cristiano Ronaldo
of agents” and it is difficult to keep count of the number of times
they get lost in each other’s eyes, reminding one another of their
success and wealth and shiny brilliance.
Mendes – sharp black suit, Rolex, phone almost permanently to his ear
– seems almost as hung up about Ronaldo winning the Ballon d’Or as CR7
himself. It is a 24-7, twitching obsession, on both their parts, given
far more relevance throughout the film than Real Madrid’s Décima
or anything else, and it is a telling moment when Mendes and one of his
associates can be heard muttering darkly from one of the Bernabéu’s
executive boxes about the possibility “the other guy might destroy
everything”.
That other guy is Lionel Messi, cast in a slightly villainous Ivan
Drago-style role that he probably does not deserve. “It’s a card inside
an envelope that can change so much,” Ronaldo says of the Ballon d’Or,
describing what it is like being expected to fake a smile on behalf of
his old adversary. “To see Messi win four in a row
was difficult for me. After he won the second and third I thought to
myself: ‘I’m not coming here again.’” Watching this film, it becomes
clear just how difficult it must be for Gareth Bale, signing for Madrid
as the most expensive player in history, to deal with that planet-sized
ego.
Other scenes are strategically laced with soft-focus Hello!
magazine-style moments where Ronaldo can be seen playing with his son,
Cristiano Jr, or dropping him off at school, but there is not always a
great deal of charm elsewhere. Muhammad Ali and Brian Clough had great
humour to go with all the braggadocio. Ronaldo’s style is not so
attractive. “I’m not going to lie to you,” he says, explaining why he
went to the World Cup with an injury. “If we had two or three Cristiano
Ronaldos in the team I would feel more comfortable. But we don’t.”
A touch of humility every now and then would make Ronaldo much more
appealing. Equally, he is as good as he is because of the way he is and a
documentary of this nature, filmed over 14 months in his company, does
show the enormous strains that come with the territory.
At one point his mother, Dolores, is filmed inside a chemist’s
handing in a prescription for sedatives because she can barely take the
stress of watching him play. Ronaldo rings and asks if she has taken her
tranquillisers yet, as if he is quite used to it. “Its quite
complicated to be the mother of a player who needs to win,” Dolores
explains. “I suffer a lot.” When he is playing in the World Cup she asks
for her flip-flops and then walks up the hill rather than watch with
the rest of the family.
It
is this insight into the inner circle that reminds us it has not been
straightforward for Ronaldo, and not just because of the fact he left
his family in Madeira at the age of 12 to join Sporting Lisbon, with his
first pimples on his forehead and braces on his teeth. Hugo, his older
brother, now runs Museu CR7, the Ronaldo museum, in Funchal but, at 20,
was spiralling into alcoholism. Hugo says it could have been him who
played football. Instead, he worked in construction, and he says
everyone drank in that game, particularly as he was used to seeing his
father, Dinis, knocking it back every night. It isn’t in the film but Dinis and Hugo resorted to selling Ronaldo’s Manchester United shirts so they could pay for more booze.
Dinis, we learn, was never the same after being called up to fight in
the Portuguese colonial war in Angola. He came back “very angry”,
Dolores explains. His head was filled with images of the war and though
she says he always cared for his children she also says she became “his
victim”. Dinis drank himself into an early grave, dying in 2005 when
Ronaldo was 19. “He was drunk nearly every day and when that happens it
became hard to have a conversation,” his younger son recalls. “I didn’t
get to know my father for real.”
As for Cristiano Jr, possibly the star of the film, Ronaldo explains
that he always wanted “my successor” without going into any other
details. His son is five, already doing sit-ups and still working on his
pronunciation of “Lamborghini”, and Dolores takes care of him while
Ronaldo is away. The mother? It’s anyone’s guess. “People speculate that
it was with this girl or the other or a surrogate mother,” Ronaldo
says. “I’ve never told anybody and I never will.” How a man in his
position has managed to keep it secret is remarkable and, unorthodox as
it might be, fair play to him.

These parts are fascinating and, at times, Ronaldo comes across as so
lonely it is a good job he enjoys his own company so much. “In football I
don’t have a lot of friends. People I really trust? Not many. Most of
the time I’m alone. I consider myself an isolated person.” It pains him
that his father is not around to see his success but Mendes, he says, is
like a father and a brother rolled into one. In Guillem Balagué’s new book about Ronaldo
he writes how, to feed the competitive beast, the player’s entourage
quickly came to realise “they must keep criticism at a distance, or
control it, create the narrative and keep him on his pedestal”. Mendes
is always there to fluff that ego and tell him he is better than Messi,
and everybody else. It is far more than just the usual player-agent
relationship.
Here, too, is the revelation that there was very nearly no Cristiano
Ronaldo either. “He was an unwanted child,” Dolores explains. She
considered an abortion and, on a neighbour’s advice, drank boiled black
beer before running until she was on the verge of fainting, hoping to
force a miscarriage. It didn’t work – and she seems pretty happy about
that.
Thirty years on, the film – released on Monday and put together by
the people behind Senna – does at least help us understand Ronaldo some
more and the incredible drive that is needed to reach the top of his
profession. It is not Ronaldo’s talent that stands out the most. It is
his competitive courage, his absolute refusal to believe anyone can
possibly outdo him and a level of self-obsession that makes one wonder
how he will cope now he is approaching the age – two years older than
Messi – when the powers gradually start to decline.
In recent years, he says, he and Messi have started talking to one
another in a way they never did previously, asking about each other’s
families and other polite small-talk. “I’ve started seeing him as a
person, not a rival,” he says. “But we are always busting our balls to
see who is better.”
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