Netflix's 'Pelé' Documents the Greatness of Man Over Myth

It is June 21, 1970 and over 100,000 people have crammed into the Estadio Azteca in Mexico City to witness a spectacle – the FIFA World Cup final between Brazil and Italy. With a little less than five minutes of normal time left to play, the Brazilians, shimmering in their yellow kits under the Mexican sun and already three goals to the good, produce something exceptional, a footballing move for the ages.

A total of six Brazilian players participate – dribbling, dodging, dancing – before the ball arrives at the feet of Pelé, who receives it with an artful nonchalance that seems to put the brakes on time. Caressing the round piece of leather, Brazil’s number 10 rolls a majestic pass with only half a glance at the onrushing Carlos Alberto, whose thumping finish into the back of the net culminates the game, the tournament, and the remarkable journey of Brazil’s golden generation.

This spellbinding sequence of football forms the narrative climax of Netflix’s eponymous documentary on Pelé (released on February 23), directed by David Tryhorn and Ben Nicholas, that asks a deceptively simple question: what does Pelé mean to Brazil?

A career in three acts

Pelé last played for Brazil in 1971, which means that most of the people watching his latest documentary would never have witnessed his magic live.

The Pelé that endures today in the public imagination is the Pelé that has been constructed through careful calibration of footballing moments, anecdotes, speculation, and pure nonsense – an elaborate project involving journalists, fans, friends and family, the Brazilian government, and, of course, Pelé himself. Consequently, to any reasonable onlooker, Pelé’s legend is both astonishing and apocryphal, redolent with the brilliant as well as the bizarre, often existing in perfect harmony with each other.

Notwithstanding the embellishments brought about by conscious manipulation and unconscious memory, Tryhorn and Nicholas do an adequate job in laying down the plain facts of Pelé’s incredible footballing journey, one that is designed to Aristotelian precision.

The first of Pelé’s three acts in football unfolds with his 17-year-old version taking the world by storm in 1958. Scoring a series of barely believable goals to guide his nation to their first-ever World Cup triumph, Pelé executes a starring role in exorcising the “Mongrel mentality” of generations past, alongside redeeming the pain of losing the final on home soil to Uruguay in 1950, an occasion chronicled by many hyperbolic observers as “Brazil’s Hiroshima”.

The next two World Cups, in 1962 and ‘66, form the second act, the inevitable insertion of conflict. Having progressed from the precocious teenager who “came from nothing” and used to shine shoes to sustain his family, Pelé is now a “national treasure….a symbol of Brazil’s emancipation”. But, on the pitch, the planet’s most awe-inspiring player is shackled, injured prematurely in consecutive World Cups. While Brazil cruise to victory in Chile in 1962, they crash out in England four years later – battered, bruised, and well beaten by a resurgent Portugal. Pelé declares that his international career is over, and heads back to his boyhood club of Santos, where the goals continue to rain all the same.

Next, it is time for act three – the 1970 World Cup in Mexico, at a time when Brazil is no longer the bustling developing democracy of the late 50s and early 60s. The right-wing junta that seized power in a bloodless coup in 1964 runs the country with an iron fist, with no tolerance for left-wingers or dissenters (often one and the same). The quest for Brazil’s third footballing world title is seen by the government of General Garrastazu Médici as a pivotal emblem of national unity and soft power. Soon, the dictator’s not-so-soft persuasive techniques are unleashed, practically compelling Pelé to return to action and lead his country to glory yet again. A bust-up with the national team coach (who is subsequently sacked), bouts of self-doubt, and some indifferent displays later, Pelé is back in his element, inspiring Brazil’s exquisitely gifted set of footballers and his own stellar career to a memorable swansong.

“I’m not dead,” cries out Pelé in the dressing room, once more a world champion.

Neutral and neutered

For decades since his retirement, Pelé has kept reminding football followers all over the world of his status in sport, his infallible position in the pantheon of the beautiful game. No matter the monotony of Pelé’s self-aggrandising declarations (which often involve referring to himself in third person), there is little debate to be had here.

The more meaningful, and definitely the more intriguing, discussion surrounds Pelé’s role off the pitch – Pelé as an ambassador, an icon, an embodiment of Brazil. Not content with repeating Pelé’s anodyne answers over the years – numerous enough to rival his goals – Tryhorn and Nicholas probe their protagonist, using their rare access to make the 80-year-old Pelé open up in a way he never has before.

“During the dictatorship, did anything change for you?” comes the pointed question. “No, football stayed the same,” is Pelé’s somewhat jarring answer. An answer that is justified by some voices in the documentary on the grounds that Pelé simply had no other choice, but to carry on with his game, indifferent to the atrocities suffered by thousands of compatriots. Pelé himself reluctantly agrees, but without any guilt or anguish at having missed out on the chance to be Brazil’s first athlete-activist.

Politics never mattered to him, football did, Pelé and his defenders seem to argue, blissfully unaware that in a country riven by crisis, Pelé – the living symbol of Brazil – mattered as much to football as he did to politics.

Unlike Muhammad Ali – an outspoken champion of political causes in the imperfect democracy of the US, or Diego Maradona – the prince of controversy who hobnobbed with Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez all the while standing up for social justice and condemning American bullishness, Pelé was Brazil’s resident superstar, the establishment’s yes-man, whose instinctive neutrality helped him retain his stature as a sporting immortal but neutered him from the prospect of being something much more.

Also Read: Diego Maradona: The God of Football Who Fought for Social Justice

The lasting legacy

One of the most touching moments in the documentary emerges when Pelé, confined to a Zimmer frame, wheels himself out to meet his former teammates from Santos for a barbecue. The lifelong friends, who address Pelé as “o rei” (the king), joke about everything from impersonating Pelé during a match to the singing voice of the great man, which, according to one, has not improved in the slightest.

Away from the glare of goals and the provocation of politics, this is where Pelé seems his most authentic, relaxed self. The parts millions have become familiar with – Pelé as the greatest of all time, Pelé as the condoner of corruption, Pelé as the self-absorbed octogenarian – recede to the background for a few minutes as the twinkle returns to Pelé’s eyes and he feels like a king again, revelling in his court.

So often in dissecting celebrity and what makes it special, documentarians forget what makes extraordinary individuals ordinary, the ways in which the celebrated are just like the rest of us, the lesser mortals. Tryhorn and Nicholas do not make this mistake, for their intention throughout the film is not to corroborate or contest the several entrenched narratives about Pelé, but to shed light on the person that has been hidden, even lost, behind the veil of politically and culturally doctored storytelling.

Once this person has been revealed, the answer to the documentary’s burning question – what Pelé means to Brazil – becomes rather obvious.

For Brazil, Pelé has always been whatever the country has desired him to be – a young black role model with a boyish charm and the Midas touch; an imperturbable hero ready to bear the burden of a nation; a loyalist of the system, not the personnel, that ruled the country; a marvellous throwback to the decadence of the 20th century; and finally, a human artefact capable of recounting his own tales. Understandably, in such a representation, there is little room for the Pelé who mismanaged his funds and almost went bankrupt after his playing days or the Pelé who cheated on his first wife and fathered children he no longer remembered.

Netflix’s Pelé does not overturn the aforementioned representation as much as it humanises the represented, filling in the nuances that would have been absent in a typical hagiography. Unlike Asif Kapadia’s semi-impressionistic portrayal of Maradona, Tryhorn and Nicholas do not have as subject someone who evokes instant polarisation, who creates his own binaries even without opening his mouth. Pelé, for better or worse, is no Maradona, but he is compelling in his own way, and the success of the film lies in being able to wrest free that compelling individual from the layers of artifice that circumstances have imposed upon him ever since he broke out at the age of 17.

Ultimately, Pelé, the documentary, is a refreshing take on one of sport’s most distinguished figures, whose greatness becomes all the more fascinating with the displacement of the glorious myth of Pelé by the still glorious yet vulnerable man that Pelé really is.

Priyam Marik is a post-graduate student of journalism at the University of Sussex, United Kingdom.