Unbreakable Review
A serviceable match, but ultimately there’s no ace in this interesting documentary that breaks no new ground.
The film follows the story of Jelena Dokic, covering her experience as a refugee and how she survived terrible abuse from her father Damir - the tennis dad from hell - to become world no. 4 on the tennis court.
Unbreakable’s greatest strength is the underlying story, and the candid nature of Jelena Dokic’s approach to her own story. It’s perhaps rare to have the subject of a documentary be so open, and so honest, about her experience, and directors Jessica Halloran and Ivan O’Mahoney do a lovely job with giving her the space, and the prompting, to dive deep into not just the facts of her abuse and experience, but also the underlying emotions, thought processes and feelings that she experienced during that time.
The documentary is otherwise, for the most part, fairly standard fare; there’s a series of talking heads, a tonne of historical footage, and a recurring motif of a young tennis player breaking through a pane of glass. The weakest part visually are the sit down interviews, particularly with Dokic - shot across seemingly two sessions, it’s the framing we return to most often throughout the film, but also cinematographically and staging-wise the least effective and least interesting.
Perhaps luckily for us, in that case, is that there is an absolute wealth of available b-roll from Dokic’s career, and the filmmaking team make wonderful use of tennis broadcasts, private footage, tv interviews and more to craft something that holds your interest.
At the end of the day, Unbreakable is an effective documentary - it tackles an interesting story, and does so in a way that is suitably compelling; but for a film with that title, one perhaps hoped for something that broke the mold a little more.
