Eddie The Eagle

Generally I like biopics because it is a great way of finding out about the life of someone you probably didn't know that much about. The problem is of course that filmmakers are prone to re-writing history or in fact making the whole thing up in the name of entertainment.

'Eddie The Eagle' is very loosely based on the true story of British Ski Jumper Eddie Edwards. Personally, I think the true story of Edwards' quest would have been even more interesting but that's just me I guess.

The film starts with Edwards’ (Taron Egerton) childhood where he is casting off his leg braces to try to pursue his dream of going to the Olympics in any sport that he can. His mother (Jo Hartley) is highly supportive of his ambition but his sceptical father Terry (Keith Allen) isn't. His father wants him to instead follow in the family plastering tradition. Which in real life he does, as a necessity to finance his Olympic dream, but not here.

After exhausting all possible summer sports Edwards turns to the winter events where he has more success and in a very short time becomes a world class downhill skier. Sadly he is cut from the British team by the stuffy Olympic selector Dustin Target (Tim McInnerny) just before the 1984 Olympics.

So he turned to ski jumping even though he didn't know much about it and headed off to a ski jumping hill in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany. It is there that he meets one of the employees at the hill, Bronson Peary (Hugh Jackman). Peary is a former ski jumper who apparently squandered his career and now drowns himself in alcohol. Which isn't true obviously.

Edwards attempts to learn to jump by trial and error while Peary repeatedly tells him to quit before he kills himself. Eventually he persuades Peary to coach him and then exploits the ancient qualification rules to qualify for the 1988 Winter Games in Calgary, something no one from Britain has done since the 1920's.

Although there has been a lot of license taken with the story it is still a pretty decent film and a total crowd pleaser. It helps that the filmmakers chose a decent actor in Taron Egerton, who clearly took the time to master the mannerisms of the real Edwards. 

With everything being played for laughs it takes some of the gloss off what a steely determined athlete Edwards really was but not all of it. His perseverance, dedication and hard work ethic still manages to shine through. For pedants like me a documentary about his life is being planned.

Edwards came last in Calgary but jumped a personal best of 71 metres, a mere 47 metres behind the Matti Nykanen who won gold. Of course Pierre de Coubertin, the foundering father of the modern Games said that the most important thing in the Olympic Games was ‘not to win but to take part’. Which, obviously, also isn’t true. Winning is everything.