He suffers from dyslexia, though it isn't diagnosed until he's well into his adolescence. His daddy doesn't love him, or at least has a hard time showing affection. The rest of the picture is frustratingly episodic as Louganis goes from one victimizer to another. As a teenager, he seems to take an overdose of his mom's sleeping pills in an apparent suicide attempt (this isn't made very clear), but the film hasn't established what brought him to this particular brink. Instead of concentrating on, say, the problems of a young man who knows he's gay, has to hide the fact and suffers a needless inferiority complex because of it, "Breaking the Surface" is determined to catalogue every wrong done to little Greggy throughout his life.
Right away the movie starts seeming whiny and Louganis something of a crybaby. As a little boy, Louganis is taunted for his dark complexion (he was born in Samoa) and for the fact that he was adopted. The world also heard, later, that Louganis had tested positive for HIV and there was something of a hullabaloo, not dramatized here, about whether blood from his head wound could have endangered other swimmers.Īnyway, writer Alan Hines drops that subject quickly and we're off down the inevitable yellow-brick flashback road. Wags may well dub it "Scratching the Surface."Ī couple of good performances, however, work valiantly in its favor and make it almost worth seeing.īased on the autobiography co-authored by the Olympic diving champion, "Surface" opens with a reenactment (which includes, apparently, some actual news footage) of Louganis conking his head on a diving board at the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, a conk heard round the world. It comes off as mealy-mouthed and tentative, the film equivalent of the sissy-boy its hero is sometimes accused of being. Unfortunately the film, which premieres tonight at 9 on the USA cable network, isn't very good. You may feel inclined to root for a movie like "Breaking the Surface: The Greg Louganis Story," partly because it deals with subject matter that is still considered touchy but really shouldn't be: Its central character is homosexual and trying to come to grips with that.
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