The story of Boris Becker is fundamentally a sad one, even if the man himself struggles to attract too much sympathy. A brilliant young tennis star who made (and spent) a fortune, who has spent his adult life in an enless succession of short term relationships with younger, glamourous women, and who ended up jailed after trying to cheat while facing bankruptcy. There is a sense of someone who could never, after his extraordinary youth, never reconcile himself to a comfortable but otherwise unremarkable afterlife. This documentary explains how it happened, but it has a tabloid feel to it. Becker himself does not contribute (he gives his own interviews, for money, only where he can control the narrative) and we get, therefore, the case for the prosecution: we see a portrait of an arrogant man, many of whose past associates are only too willing to go on camera and say what is wrong with him. Maybe there is no case for the defence; but it feels a bit distatseful watching two hours learning about an apparently unlikeable (but not truly evil) man.
Review of Boris Becker: The Rise and Fall
