Roger Federer is arguably the greatest male tennis player who ever lived, and walking away from a career like his couldn’t have been easy. Federer: Twelve Final Days, a new feature-length documentary streaming on Prime Video, follows the great through those final moments of on-court glory. Billed as a “home movie never intended for public viewing”, the documentary blends as-it-happens footage with retrospective interviews from the legend and his contemporaries.
The Gist: The press releases for Federer: Twelve Final Days bills the movie as “a home movie never intended for public viewing”, and whether or not you believe that, it gives you a stylistic sense of what’s coming. It’s a lot of ostensibly-lightly-edited reality-show-style footage as a camera crew follows Federer around, interspersed with interviews from the man himself as well as fellow greats and sometimes-rivals Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic, and Andy Murray.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: It’s hard to talk about a great athlete hanging it up without thinking of The Last Dance, though this doesn’t have the career-spanning focus that that sprawling docuseries did. A closer parallel might be the Conor McGregor doc McGregor Forever, which saw the famous fighter grappling with the potential for his career ending, but even that’s not quite right. More than anything, it reminded me of a book–Geoff Dyer’s The Last Days of Roger Federer, itself a meandering set of meditations on endings that came out a few months before Federer’s 2022 retirement.
Performance Worth Watching: It’s hard to imagine you’d be watching anyone other than Roger Federer, but the presence of his few true peers–Andy Murray, Novak Djokovic and most importantly, Rafael Nadal–is the best part of Federer: Twelve Final Days.
Memorable Dialogue: There’s lots to choose from, but the most jarring and memorable might be right at the beginning, when Federer introduces himself to the camera saying that “I’m Roger Federer and I was a professional tennis player for over 24 years.” It’s that was–it still doesn’t sound right, even now, nearly two years after he hung up his “is”. He elaborates: “Sometimes, we players don’t like that ‘retirement’ word, it feels so much like the end of everything… the line is drawn, you’re a completely different person and every day’s going to be different… and I wanted to make sure it wasn’t going to be like that.”
Sex and Skin: None. Did you come to this looking for it? That’s on you, friend.
Our Take: In his 2018 stand-up special Kid Gorgeous at Radio City, comedian John Mulaney goes on an extended riff about meeting Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger backstage at Saturday Night Live.
“My friends were all like ‘is he nice?’ No! Or, maybe he is, for his version of life. Because he has a very different life. He’s Mick Jagger. That’s his name! He’s played to stadiums of 20,000 people cheering for him like he’s a god for fifty years. That must change you as a person. If you do that for fifty years, you’re never again going to be like, ‘um, does anyone have a laptop charger I can borrow?”
Yes, I’m off-topic here, but I couldn’t help but think of this bit when watching Federer: Twelve Final Days, a documentary film purporting to be a “home movie” that wasn’t originally intended for public release. I find it hard to believe that an athlete who’s been in an echelon of success and fame that maybe–generously–a dozen other people have reached in a generation would do anything that isn’t carefully stage-managed and crafted for public consumption.
(Off the top of my head: Serena Williams, Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo, Tom Brady, Tiger Woods, LeBron James… I dunno, it gets tough after that?)
This sense that we’re not really seeing the real Roger Federer plays out in an early scene where he’s preparing to publicly announce his retirement. It’s a moment that the sports world had speculated on for more than a decade, and it’s something that could play as terrific drama, but it quickly devolves into unnecessary name-dropping, with a member of Federer’s team fielding a phone call from “his biggest fan,” legendary Vogue editor Anna Wintour. It feels forced, but then–like Mulaney’s bit–maybe it is real for his version of life. Watching it, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was being put on like an episode of House Hunters, where a couple is forced to pretend they didn’t buy the house they’re ‘looking at’ months ago.
This isn’t to say that Federer: Twelve Final Days is without merit. For one thing, it’s mercifully light on career retrospective. Too many athlete-focused documentaries–and there are a lot these days–feel the need to go through the whole Batman-origin-story arc each time. We don’t need a bunch of footage of a teenage Federer talking about what it was like growing up in Switzerland dreaming of playing tennis; this is a movie that came to talk about the end of his career, and it largely sticks to that assignment. This limited focus gives the proceedings a pace that wanders from elegiac at best to funereal at worst, but it doesn’t demean the viewer by turning into a Wikipedia entry on his career.
Counterintuitively, the moments that feel the most like we’re seeing the real Roger Federer are the ones that are the most likely to have been stage-managed by multiple teams of PR professionals. Those are the moments when he interacts with the few people who could be reasonably described as his “peers,” fellow tennis greats Bjorn Borg, John McEnroe, Andy Murray, Novak Djokovic, and the man to whom he was most often compared during his career, rival Rafael Nadal. These moments–as planned as they might be–come the closest to offering a window into a version of life that’s never going to seem normal if you haven’t lived it.
Our Call: SKIP IT. If you’re a big Federer fan, Federer: Twelve Final Days is surely going to get you sentimental and maybe even entertain you, but it’s not going to give the long-awaited window into the man’s soul that you might’ve hoped for.
Scott Hines, publisher of the widely-beloved Action Cookbook Newsletter, is an architect, blogger and proficient internet user based in Louisville, Kentucky.