‘Federer: Twelve Final Days’ Review: A Partial Backstage Pass to the Tennis Great’s Retirement Party
variety.comAndrew Barker Senior Features Writer In his classic 1994 essay “How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart,” David Foster Wallace pondered why so many athlete memoirs — and tennis player memoirs in particular — fail to provide sports fans with what they really want to know.
What does it feel like to fail in front of millions of people? How does a human being handle such intense pressure? What actually goes through one’s mind in those do-or-die moments where the difference between eternal glory and lifelong disappointment is one tiny miscalculation or half-second’s hesitation?
Maybe, Wallace eventually concludes, the answer to that last question is “nothing much at all,” and “the real secret behind top athletes’ genius may be as esoteric and obvious and dull and profound as silence itself.” In his two previous sports documentaries, “Senna” and “Diego Maradona,” filmmaker Asif Kapadia has gone a great distance toward disproving Wallace’s thesis, using ingeniously edited archival footage to probe the psyches of Formula One champion Ayrton Senna and soccer god Maradona in all their noisy complexity.
Directing alongside Joe Sabia, Kapadia attempts to crack a much tougher nut with the Prime Video documentary “Federer: Twelve Final Days,” a fly-on-the-wall snapshot of Swiss tennis legend Roger Federer during the short span between announcing his retirement and playing his final professional match in 2022.
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