Oscar-winning director Fisher Stevens’ Beckham series, which depicts the rise of David Beckham, has been released on Netflix. You have never seen the legendary footballer (and his wife Victoria Beckham) like this before.
The series consists of four episodes, in which the director tells in a very sincere and frank way how an ordinary guy from London grew up not only into one of the world’s legendary footballers, but also into an international celebrity – with a wife who is an absolute world star.
“Beckham is based on frank interviews with the footballer himself, but not only: his wife Victoria Beckham, David’s parents, his former Manchester United teammates, sworn rivals, best friend, former coach, team secretary who worked for decades – in short, everyone who knows what we want to know. The only thing more impressive than the cast of characters is the honesty, and sometimes painful frankness, of the speakers who talk about the stunning ups and downs of Beckham’s life.
The first episode begins with David tending to the beehives he keeps near the Beckhams’ Cotswolds country house. We are also shown excerpts from childhood home movies made by his father, Ted. In these videos, he and David talk about the young years of the boy who, at the age of 12 or 13, was placed in the hands of Manchester United coach Sir Alex Ferguson – who almost immediately offered the teenager a contract.
Thousands and thousands of hours spent alone with the ball in the small backyard of his family’s home, combined with the work of his coaches, created a footballer with a style of play so refined that it allowed him to essentially score goals from anywhere on the field. On the first day of the 1996 Premier League season, Beckham scored a goal for Manchester United from halfway up the field, a strike that was seen around the world and instantly made him a household name.
A few months later, while watching TV with a teammate, Beckham saw the Spice Girls, pointed to the girl who called herself Posh Spice, and immediately announced that he was going to marry her. Soon, David and Victoria’s romance captivated the nation. “I just liked her,” Beckham now explains it this way. “I just liked him,” says Victoria, who immediately made it clear to Beckham that although she didn’t care about football, she would take care of her husband. “Okay, that’s it,” David says of the beginning of the relationship. He adds: “It moved fast.”
Soon, David started getting out of the training camp and would drive four hours to London to see Victoria for 20 minutes. At one point he was photographed with her in the city, dressed in a sarong, and these photos in the tabloids caused a scandal in the country. And on the night before the decisive, epic 1998 World Cup match against Argentina, Victoria – on tour with the Spice Girls – called David and told him she was pregnant with their first child.
What happened the next day is a kind of compass for the entire documentary. If you’re a soccer fan, you already know that it was Argentine midfielder Diego Simeone who fouled and landed on the ground, and Beckham impulsively kicked Simeone in the calf. Simeone theatrically fell to the ground, clutching his leg; and Beckham was shown a red card by the referee and sent off from the match, which England lost, thus eliminating him from the tournament.
After this incident, Beckham became the most hated man in England. “I wish there was a pill you could take to erase the memories,” David says. “I made a stupid mistake.” Before he began to hide from the public, he was shouted at and spat at by strangers; virtually everyone in the country, from the England coach to the then Prime Minister Tony Blair, blamed him entirely for England’s shameful loss. A London pub hung a doll dressed in Beckham’s uniform. People sent him bullets to the Manchester United offices. When he was introduced during away games, tens of thousands of fans shouted obscenities at him, and when Victoria showed up to watch her husband play, these tens of thousands sang vulgar, sexually explicit chants directed at her. “It’s only now, when I’m 47 years old, that I’ve started to reflect on it,” says David, recalling the death threats his parents received.
The main idea of the series is that the strength of their marriage helped them to survive the difficulties. And the Beckhams’ trademark humor, of course. During the interviews, they are fascinating to watch: they agree and disagree with each other, make fun of each other and themselves, and are even ready to air their dirty laundry a little – for example, when David told Victoria that he could not be present at the birth of their youngest son Cruz (the couple has four children) because he was filming with Beyoncé and J.Lo. (Or how David asked Victoria to help him with his hair-while she was lying in a hospital bed after an epidural minutes after giving birth-so he could go talk to the press about their new baby.) They are also careful to comment on rumors of David’s infidelity during a difficult time in the early 2000s.
The most amazing thing, the director says in the series, is not that one of the most famous athletes of our time married one of the most famous pop stars of our time, but that both David and Victoria were able to turn their extravagant, youthful relationship into a true love, a marriage and a family that can withstand anything.
