Exploring the lives of three determined teenage table tennis players as they train for the 2012 Summer Olympics in London, Sara Newens and Mina T. Son’s documentary Top Spin is to ping pong what Hoop Dreams is to basketball. The stakes are lower, and there aren’t really sociopolitical implications, but Top Spin shares Hoop Dreams’s sympathetic viewpoint and dramatic depiction of athletic ability innately tied to feelings of self-worth. And therein lies a sad irony: unlike basketball, professional table tennis isn’t lucrative. The best table tennis players in the world don’t enjoy even a modicum of the fame, fortune and power of an NBA player. The subjects here—high school students Ariel Hsing, Michael Landers and Lily Zhang—strive to succeed athletically and academically, sacrificing their personal and social lives during their most formative years, with little more than bragging rights and pride on the line.
Nothing much in Top Spin is surprising, but the stuff that is smacks like a well-swung paddle swatting a twirling ball. Newens and Son shoot some of the action in smooth, ultra-slow-motion, illustrating the stamina required of a sport most people play while half-drunk in their parents’ basement. Portrayals of table tennis in cinema are usually comical and quaint, but Top Spin’s depiction is anything but humorous, revealing the flexed muscles, bulged eyeballs and flushed faces of human bodies under extreme physical duress. When shown at normal speed, the matches move so fast that they’re nearly impossible to fathom; juxtaposed, these divergent approaches create an almost surreal feeling of time and movement rendered irrelevant.
Despite their youth, Ariel, Michael and Lily are highly respected players, the best in their age group, and they are already earning some money on the pro circuit. Unfortunately, their standing is limited thanks to America’s marginalized global reputation. Table tennis is something of a novelty in the United States, and the film contrasts America’s irrelevance with the game’s ubiquity and prestige in China, where the top players are treated like serious athletes. The closest thing to notoriety the Americans receive are visits from millionaires like Warren Buffett, who’s seen clowning around with professional players in a way he never would with LeBron James or Tom Brady.
Structurally, the film is a slog. Newens and Son map the story along the same road that leads to the Olympics, starting with regional trials before the more intense qualifying rounds. (This process is illustrated by a series of cutely animated charts and graphs, which are infuriatingly pervasive in contemporary documentaries.) Between matches, we see the kids at school and with their friends and family, an approach that actually makes them less remarkable because their personal lives seem so conventional, full of regular teen pressures like picking a college and dealing with strict parents. The plotline makes sense from an organizational standpoint, but the formula is contrived and boring, and it nearly undercuts the film’s most poignant moment. When one of the players fails to make the Olympic Games, they nonchalantly claim “I was really, really happy to be done with it, even though I was crushed.” The film’s central question asks whether a life of professional obscurity is worth all the pain and sacrifice, and the answer, coming from one of table tennis’s most promising stars, amounts to little more than a shrug.