There’s been a pandemic-level preponderance of hagiographic documentaries in the streaming era: David Beckham has one, Michelle Obama has one, Billy Joel got one just a couple months ago. It’s in vogue to be obscenely wealthy and successful and have someone follow you around with a camera for a while — kids call it aura-farming. But Clemente is different because there’s no Roberto Clemente around to farm for aura. If a documentary is to be made, it’s because of the value intrinsic to his life, which ended tragically in a plane crash on December 31, 1972, almost three months to the day after he landed his 3,000th and final regular season hit in the MLB.
The number three was significant for Clemente. He had three kids. He played at Three Rivers Stadium. “Threes everywhere you look,” his son Roberto Jr. says in an interview. The only three Clemente doesn’t mention is the Holy Trinity, of which Clemente might as well have been a part. Yes, Clemente skips past pillow-soft hagiography and aims straight for claims of messianic martyrdom: it takes less than two minutes for someone to refer to him in relation to Jesus. Clemente-ness, one might say, is next to godliness.
To be fair, the virtues were many. Clemente was a consummate humanitarian, a proud Black Puerto Rican baseball player when the game was still dominated by whites, a mentor for kids in his hometown, and a local hero who always stopped to acknowledge admirers on the streets of Pittsburgh, where he played for the entirety of his Major League career. The list goes on, and on, and on, and on. Clemente was so good, even when he was bad he was good. Midway through the film, one of his sons offers “some real dirt” on his father: a pitcher struck him out and threw some xenophobic words his way as he jogged to the dugout from home plate. During his next at bat, infuriated, he slapped a ball right into the pitcher’s leg. Some of this material is useful for the film — it fills the story out and gives it a shingle to hang Clemente’s successes on — but Clemente lays it on way too thick. He’s the guardian angel that appears everywhere and leaves fairy dust on everything he touches. In other words, not a human at all, but a saint.
Clemente brings with it some major star power to move the canonization process along. Rita Moreno gives the effort some Old Hollywood credibility, Richard Linklater pops in to — literally — call Clemente an angel, and Michael Keaton amiably plays the part of the awestruck fan. Clemente cycles through the interviews with typical sports doc restlessness, along with a cascade of baseball cards, photographs, magazines, newspapers, TV reels, and woefully uninspired animation. In one egregious segment, Roberto Jr. talks about how Roberto’s mom was (of course) a great athlete, too. She throws la chanclatera at him and as it sails through the air, it transmogrifies into a baseball, which he catches. It’s a pitiful crutch for when the archival technique — itself already a juiced-up pivot from the enervating talking head format — isn’t enough.
Every now and again, director David Altrogee remembers Roberto Clemente was also one of the greatest baseball players who ever lived, and we do, at times, get a good sense of how he achieved what he set out to do on the field. The film jolts to life during these segments, bouncing gracefully between interviews with players who were there and footage of the games. Clemente always serves as the leader, but it lets the team give the movie some much-needed color: a deep dive into the 1971 World Series against the Baltimore Orioles is particularly inspired.
The Pittsburgh Pirates of the 1960s-’70s were full of fascinating figures. Some get to wax poetic about the glory days, but others, like Dock Ellis — sort of the Yin to Clemente’s Yang, immortalized in No No: A Dockumentary for pitching a no-hitter on LSD — sadly only get a passing mention. Altrogee will often dig into some really good detail on the team, and then, spurned by Pavlovian conditioning or a tap on the shoulder by Executive Producer LeBron James, digress into an anecdote meant yet again to convince us that Clemente was the salt of the earth.
If there was any guessing, at the end of the documentary Roberto Jr. says it plainly: “Baseball is secondary to what the name Clemente means.” What he and the movie around him neglect is that, in storytelling, a few well-timed acts of valiance mean a whole lot more than a tsunami of them. Clemente is so slick, so easy, and so fawning that it ends up undermining its own raison d’etre, destining itself to become the go-to movie to put on when the gym teacher is absent.
DIRECTOR: David Altrogge; CAST: Steve Blass, Roberto Clemente Jr., Bob Costas; DISTRIBUTOR: mTuckerman Media; IN THEATERS: September 12; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 41 min.
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