‘Concussion’ movie offers sobering view of NFL, brain injuries

Here is the dilemma for ‘‘Concussion,’’ a movie that deals with brain injury as a dirty sidelight of playing in the NFL: It isn’t nearly as exciting as an NFL game itself.

This isn’t the fault of the movie, which stars Will Smith and will be released Christmas Day.

Zoom-ins on lab researcher Smith’s eyeballs as they peer through the twin orbs of a microscope are nothing compared to the assassin-cold focus of Tom Brady’s eyes as he stands behind center on a snowy field, searching for a weak spot in which to plunge his scalpel.

Football, particularly football at the highest level, basically has been impervious to criticism. Even when, at the start of the 1900s, the carnage was astonishing — more than a dozen college players killed per year — the game wasn’t stopped or made illegal.

Teddy Roosevelt and the nascent NCAA just tweaked the rules to stop the most obvious splatter porn — fractured skulls, caved-in faces, wedges that caused spines to snap — and the game rolled on.

Such is the mystery of our relationship to a sport that has been mythologized as embodying our most aggressive virtues, has been inculcated into our educational system and is entertaining as all get out that bad news doesn’t seem to matter.

This concussion stuff isn’t new.

If you’ve been asleep for the last decade or so, then maybe the link between head blows and the horrific brain disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) is news to you. If there’s a college or NFL player anywhere who isn’t aware of the cause and effect by now, then shame on him.

The movie was based on a 2009 GQ exposé by Jeanne Marie Laskas called ‘‘Brain Game.’’ But it could have been based on any number of exposés — work by former Harvard football player and pro wrestler Chris Nowinski, Alan Schwarz’s series in the New York Times or Malcolm Gladwell’s story in the New Yorker.

Six years ago is forever in a scandal that the NFL has fought with muffled hammer and tong, an ugly story that might lead down to the peewee level and to an entire U.S. male populace being dumbed down because of the millions of boys and young men who have played football.

Indeed, it long has been my hypothesis that head-banging diminishes the masses. You don’t need raging cases of dementia, such as Hall of Famer Mike Webster’s, to see the link between the sport and the disease.

Still, the NFL’s popularity and ratings soar. The league is Teflon. And its PR work — the NFL is masterful at resisting the truth, then coming to the good side when necessary — is hard to counter. This is the entity, after all, that discovered a vacant but sanctified day — Sunday — and claimed it for its own.

‘‘Concussion’’ is a whistle-blower thriller in the vein of ‘‘Erin Brockovich,’’ ‘‘Serpico’’ and other earnest movies, and it does what it intends to do. It shows that Dr. Bennet Omalu (played by Smith), the Nigerian-born forensic pathologist who first sliced into Webster’s ruined brain, was marginalized, discredited and even threatened with the ruination of his career as a scientist simply because football big shots didn’t believe — or want it known — that football caused CTE.

This is true. I spoke with Omalu several years ago, and he was hurt and angry by so many people trying to undermine his work simply because it wasn’t what they wanted to hear. Omalu told me that he knew nothing about U.S. football at the start, that he saw what he saw on those slides of brain tissue. He said that people treated him as though he were a witch doctor because of his dark skin and thick accent.

Smith does a great job of portraying the scientist in dismay, and this should be another lesson to all about trusting monoliths that have a product to protect. Hello, tobacco industry. Hello, asbestos industry.

And I’ll tell you this: If you know nothing about the ravages of CTE, the Webster character, played by a raving, greasy-haired David Morse, a ruined hero reduced to living in a car, will terrify you.

But here’s what troubles me most. At the end comes this disclaimer: ‘‘While this story is based on actual events, certain characters, characteristics, incidents, locations and dialogue were fictionalized or invented for the purposes of dramatization.’’

Why? The history stands alone. The disclaimer makes one fear this is similar to the best-selling book ‘‘A Million Little Pieces’’ — largely true but with the juicy stuff invented.

Did the NFL scare Columbia Pictures? Because with that disclaimer, the league wins again.

Follow me on Twitter @ricktelander.

Email: rtelander@suntimes.com