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(060905) My cohort JR wasn’t very impressed by the latest
collaboration of Ron Howard and Russell Crowe but I am. In spite of its current
box office failure, this is a pretty good film. JR retold the story so I’ll just
say the film is about the fall and rebirth of Jim Braddock during the time of
the Great Depression. Braddock was an up and comer from New Jersey with a
dutiful wife and three kids who fell on hard times when the stock market
bottomed out. He fought hurt and at a point when he needed to fight to make
money for his family he has a poor showing in front of the head of the Boxing
Commission (wonderfully played by Animal House’s Bruce McGill) and loses his
license. Without a license he was forced to work on the docks as a ‘day
laborer’, which meant that he and thirty other guys would stand out in front of
a fence and hope he got picked. We see this proud man living off of one piece of
fried bologna and watered down milk. We see Braddock at the aid office and
walking thru a New York that changes from tenement to luxury for a scene that
has him begging from the promoters who once used him. The scene is one of the
most powerful things you can see because it shows us how bad his life truly is.
Braddock’s fortunes change by way of a fluke. A fighter drops out of a
championship set up bout and a replacement is needed. His manager, Joe Gould
(Paul Giamatti) gets his a nice payoff and a great send off in his ‘last fight’
but things written on paper don’t always happen and Braddock wins the fight.
This starts him on a run that leads us to a title shot with the current champ,
Max Baer (Craig Bierko). Baer was in his time the Mike Tyson of the era. He
lived hard and killed two men in the ring. Bierko gives us an interesting
performance that shows us that Baer could go from funny guy to stone killer in
an instant. With a semi-Shemp hairdo and a cockeyed smile you can’t take your
eyes off him whenever he shows up. The final fight is built up as an event that
everyone in New York (and probably the world) was following on his or her
radios. Having seen a fair amount of film fights in my time this ranks amongst
the all time bests.
Howard is generally thought of as a "by the numbers" type of director but here
as he showed in “A Beautiful Mind” he has an eye for great cinematography. There
are some special cinema moves in this film that show without going into major
detail that times have changed. Howard also does the Oliver Stone thing by
changing film stocks when going into flashback as well as shooting the fight
scenes in the same style as James Wong Howe in the classic “Body and Soul”. The
performances are uniformly excellent with standout performances from Giamatti,
Bierko, McGill, Nicholas Campbell and even Paddy Constantine in a fictional
character invented just show us another side of the depression. Renee Zellweger
is just okay if you ask me but Crowe is downright amazing. Crowe can play ‘big’
when he needs to but here there are moments where he shows more by just a quick
reaction than overselling it. The boxing scenes are stunning and there are times
where you forget you are watching a movie and cheer like you were watching a
real fight. Some are speculating that the film isn’t doing well since Crowe
threw a phone but the main problem here is that this is not a summer film. If
the film came out later in the year I believe it would have been a hit and I
believe it will do very well on DVD.
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