It would be safe to surmise that if you want to stand a chance at beating Novak Djokovic, you play him in an empty stadium, or better yet, fill it with fans. The tennis star will be thrown off track by all the love!
Djokovic, widely regarded as the “greatest tennis player in the sport’s history”, famously thrives under pressure. He weaponises the disdain that crowds often show him and turns it into fuel that has pushed him farther than any tennis player in history. He has now reached that stage in his career where a documentary can be made about him. But the one we’ve been presented with by Prime Video is hardly the tribute that the champion deserves.
Titled Novak Djokovic: The Wolf in Winter, the film has been directed by Jason Hehir, who previously made Netflix’s viral 2020 sensation, The Last Dance. That wildly popular series revisited the equally inspiring career of basketball legend Michael Jordan. But even after 10 hours, it left you feeling like there was a lot more to unpack. The Wolf in Winter, on the other hand, is just 92 minutes long; not only does it fall short in its efforts to capture the life and times of one of tennis’ most controversial stars, but it also fails as a piece of filmmaking.
Saying it as it unfolded
A glorified YouTube video assembled from standard-issue talking-head footage of all the usual suspects, The Wolf in Winter makes the curious mistake of telling Djokovic’s story from chapter one. This approach would have been better suited to a series; alternatively, Hehir might have focused on a single episode in Djokovic’s career, leaving the cradle-to-the-grave narrative for later.
Only a couple of years ago, the Oscar-winning director Asif Kapadia made a documentary feature on Djokovic’s great rival, Roger Federer. Smartly, that film revolved purely around Federer’s retirement and the subsequent farewell tour that he embarked on.
The Wolf in Winter, on the other hand, serves as something of an introduction to Djokovic. It spends at least 30 minutes educating audiences about the horrors that he grew up around as a Serbian child in the 1990s. We’ve all heard the stories; Djokovic has told them often enough. Instead of examining how these hardships turned him into a ruthless killer on the tennis court, however, the documentary simply recounts the facts like a Wikipedia entry in video format.
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The sight of Djokovic performing a surya namaskar and pranayama in the film’s opening moments sets the tone for something else entirely; you could be forgiven for assuming that The Wolf in Winter is a more intimate portrait of the star. It isn’t. The closest it comes to depicting what life off the court is like for Djokovic is through the many clips that we’re shown of him being a goof with his kids. But even these moments are undercut with tired narration about what a great father he is.
He’s also a gracious loser, a devoted husband and a kind mentor to younger players, the documentary reminds the viewers. But this isn’t the popular narrative about him.
No scratching beneath the surface
Over the years, Djokovic has frequently antagonised the public. Some of it may be intentional.
In one scene, the great American champion Andre Agassi claims to have cracked Djokovic’s psyche during the year or so that he spent coaching him. Djokovic wants to be kind and receive love, Agassi says, but the tragedy is that “he can’t win if he allows his heart to go there”. In other words, Djokovic wins only when the environment around him is toxic. He craves anger and fear.
Now, this may well be because of the trauma he experienced as a child of war. But The Wolf in Winter shows surprisingly little interest in investigating this idea. Djokovic speaks about having to grow up sooner than he needed to and the pressure he felt to provide for his family when the going got tough. But these are superficial observations that virtually every tennis fan would be aware of. If insight is what you’re looking for, you won’t find it here.
For instance, the documentary finds him at an odd stage in his career; he is the most decorated tennis player of all time, but he’s clearly not in any mood to retire. In that regard, The Wolf in Winter doesn’t have the gravity of the Federer documentary, or even the recent Rafael Nadal series on Netflix.
Neither of them appear in The Wolf in Winter, while Djokovic made an appearance in both Federer and Nadal’s farewell documentaries. This says more about him than it does about them. Djokovic has always felt like the odd one out, on the tennis circuit for disrupting the Federer-Nadal rivalry and off it for projecting himself as an anti-vaxxer at a time when following the rules would’ve been the sanest thing to do. All he wants is to be accepted.
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While the Federer film had all the self-seriousness and poise that you’d associate with the great man, the Nadal series focused on precisely what the Spanish icon was known for: his physical strength. Djokovic, on the other hand, is widely regarded as the most psychologically accomplished player to ever pick up a racquet. He’s like a wall of reinforced concrete, unbreakable even after a hammering. It’s a pity, then, that The Wolf in Winter doesn’t share his emotional complexity and sheer passion.