Since its launch in 2009, ESPN’s 30 for 30 series has been a reliably entertaining collection of documentaries, each film chronicling a memorable (or fascinatingly obscure) sports moment and offering fresh perspective on what transpired. Although these movies come in different forms, the typical 30 for 30 entry is packaged like a slick oral history, combining new talking-head interviews and archival footage with a little light commentary sprinkled in about the event’s cultural or political implications.
The cable channel’s newest installment in the series is its most ambitious, transcending superficial descriptions such as “entertaining” to get at something deeper, richer, truer. But if you’re conversant with the structure of earlier 30 for 30s, it’s also pleasingly familiar. O.J.: Made in America clocks in at seven-and-three-quarter hours, but it breezes by. The film encapsulates 30 for 30 at its best: It’s endlessly riveting, smartly packaged and exceedingly intelligent. And most important of all, O.J. makes a pretty convincing case to non-sports fans why the rest of us invest so much emotional energy into the exploits of men playing children’s games. Sports are never just sports—they’re an extension of the race and class issues we experience on a daily basis. O.J. Simpson symbolized something powerful in our collective unconscious. And as this movie demonstrates, his fall from grace was partly ours.
O.J. resides in a strange new middle ground that’s being occupied by more and more entertainment these days. Where most 30 for 30 installments run about two hours (including commercials) so that it can fit cozily into ESPN’s programming blocks, this new documentary will air in five chapters, one chapter per day. But because ESPN is so giddy about the movie’s awards possibilities, the company recently released O.J. in theaters in New York and Los Angeles for a week so that it could qualify for Oscar consideration. It’s not uncommon for 30 for 30 films to premiere at festivals such as Toronto and SXSW—O.J. made its debut at Sundance earlier this year—but this is the first time ESPN has taken the extra step of treating one of its documentaries as a piece of cinema rather than “just” a TV movie. As a result, a handful of people have experienced the uncut O.J. in theaters, whereas most viewers will watch the documentary in (presumably) a slightly edited-for-content version on the small screen.
However you see O.J., though, it’s engrossing from its first minutes. The expectation might be that the film will focus on Simpson’s mid-1990s murder trial, where he faced charges of killing his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, and while that’s somewhat true, director Ezra Edelman wants to graft a much more profound and overarching narrative around that court case. And so we start at the beginning, the documentary returning to the poor Northern California community where Simpson grew up, quickly fast-forwarding to his first brush with glory and fame as he becomes a celebrated running back at the University of Southern California in the 1960s. 30 for 30 films usually concentrate on one incident—a classic game or playoff series—but not unlike ESPN’s portrait of the 1990s Michigan basketball team, The Fab Five, O.J. aspires to be a comprehensive biography. As such, O.J. is a seductive rise-then-fall narrative that will be familiar to those who know Simpson’s story. And yet, Edelman consistently digs deeper to find the telling societal detail or intriguing character quirk so that we feel like we’re relearning the athlete’s life from a fresh, thoughtfully considered new perspective.
O.J. doesn’t waste much time laying out its overriding thesis. Early on, it becomes clear that Edelman, who smartly resists using a narrator, sees Simpson as a man who wanted to transcend race, believing he should be judged by his merits, not by his skin color. (This theory is advanced by childhood friends and business associates, and O.J. does a rather marvelous job of reaching out to people throughout Simpson’s life to provide insights into the man.)
On its surface, Simpson’s belief was commendable, but as O.J. rolls along, we start to understand how his attitude actually hid a more troubling reality: In truth, he didn’t want to be seen as black, almost as if he was ashamed of his race. Exploiting his charisma and celebrity, the man nicknamed Juice strove to ingratiate himself into mainstream white America. But what at first simply seems hypocritical—he was a prominent African-American sportsman who chose not to use his position to advocate racial equality at a time when other black athletes were risking much by speaking out—will ultimately prove to be a dark flaw in his personality. As O.J. eventually illustrates, Simpson’s acceptance by (white) Americans was a narcotic that he craved. When he lost it, catastrophe beckoned.