Punch Drunk: The Culture of Classic Sports in Current Cinema with "Cinderella Man" Riding Shotgun
24 July 2005
Primo Carnera. Max Baer. Jim Braddock. Joe Louis. A footnote in history, James J. Braddock, the answer to the trivia question, who was the heavyweight champion before Joe Louis? Yet, in Ron Howard’s film Cinderella Man (Universal/Miramax, 2005), Louis is himself the footnote to Braddock’s title triumph. Howard and leading-man Russell Crowe bring Braddock back to center stage, just as the real Braddock reclaimed his birth into boxing greatness.
For Cinderella Man is a fine film, honestly well conceived and certainly well-executed. It has everything we have come to expect from Howard – a strong if unsophisticated visual tableau, dominant central (male) character and a perhaps too subservient female lead (remember Apollo 13?), astoundingly good supporting performances (Ed Harris from Apollo 13 gives way to Paul Bettany in A Beautiful Mind giving way, now, to the surprise powerhouse Paul Giamatti) and interesting transitions, really the only thing in Howard’s visuals that make you go, nice (Ronny has always been good with the transitions). Surprisingly, perhaps, given his previous work, Howard gives little ground to fluff and sentimentality; oh, it’s there, no doubt, but it doesn’t override, muttle, or drown out the heart of the story, and damn it if at times the film isn’t downright touching. That has been something Howard has always been good at: touch.
After all, Cinderella Man has a wonderful sense of touch. It takes on the Depression, the Braddock-Baer title fight, Braddock’s career, and America’s sense of itself in a time of desolation, but it takes them all on in moderation, giving each its due and reasonable time. In fact, the title fight tolls for a good half-hour at the end of film – not a quick, anti-climactic flash at the end of a supposed boxing movie or a dead, oversized weight dragging the facile wreck down (I am thinking of Rocky IV here). In Howard’s picture, the fight is a really good, serious piece of drama. It stands on its own terms, as much as it stands as the fitting finish to a worthy story.
But let me not overstate myself. Cinderella Man, as a whole, is good, standing on an plain with a film like Seabiscuit – indeed those two recent reminders of Depression era sport biopics are almost too similar to separate. As far as the boxing genre goes, Cinderella Man is another nice example of what is really unique about the best boxing movies, why we keep coming back to them, and what they tell us about ourselves: it is about a boxer, not boxing. Like in Raging Bull and Rocky, the incidence of boxing directs our lead character but it does not limit him to a one-act show. This is not boxing for the sake of sport, for the sake of the political or social statement boxing might allow us to make, like in later Rocky’s, like in Million Dollar Baby. Rather, it is a character study, a who and why, an engagement with a man on his basest levels, that makes us wonder what we would do in like circumstance, what we would do at our barest essentials. And for that it is interesting.
Cinderella Man is not, however, as it is being advertised, "one of the best movies ever." For one, Howard doesn’t give his audience enough credit, using handhelds as if we wouldn’t get that the depression was a shaky and unstable time (and could we finally dispense with the seemingly requisite training montage for boxers, please?). Cinderella Man comes far too close to A Beautiful Mind for Ron Howard’s good: the score is similar, the visuals, the lead actor, the focus on the central male character. You also hear in it the echoes of On the Waterfront, which ultimately hurts Cinderella Man for one reason: unlike Waterfront, Cinderella Man doesn’t challenge, AT ALL. It is a good story, well told, but why? Simply to honor a man long past, long since a footnote? Is that enough? Could we have done better? The story is told, cinematically speaking, very straight-forward, very standard. Could we have done better? Whereas, in On the Waterfront, we were witnessing the creation of an acting revolution – the development of the Method before our eyes – what is happening in Cinderella Man but, really, the same old thang?
I’ll give you an answer, for the "could we have done better?" Why not show us Jimmy Braddock? Could we have not seen the real man, the real fight? Certainly not in the same way: we wouldn’t know the background, the life-story, the rise from the gutters, the hurt and humiliation caused to Jimmy Braddock at the docks... Seeing just the fight wouldn’t have been the same.
But imagine if Braddock were fighting today – assuming boxing still had the luster it had in the thirties. We would know that back story: we would know everything about him, just as we can’t help but know every little mishap that befalls Olympic athletes, every little sob story of the college basketball star risen from the ghetto. The media now makes it a business to sell the athlete-as-character-in-a-movie, which may be why it has become a marketable thing for Hollywood to sell old and obscure sports triumphs with the veneer of the classic-era biopic: Seabiscuit, Miracle, Stroke of Genius, Game of Their Lives, Cinderella Man, the soon-to-arrive The Greatest Game Ever Played, perhaps the worst title in the history of sports film. Sport, after all, is inherently marketable as entertainment: it is, in essence, entertainment itself, so it leads well to having movies made about it, and you wonder, sometimes, watching something like Cinderella Man, if it isn’t all a farce, watching a movie about watching a sport.
More importantly, this tendency toward giving character to sports’ past greats in film may just lead us to forgetting about the sport itself, because (a) soon we’ll run out of great sports moments to recount, not because they don’t happen anymore, but because we’ll soon catch up to that point in time when we over reported our sports heroes and know everything about them already (see Ali) and (b) because how many times has our knowledge of an athletes’ personal life overshadowed his accomplishments on the field? It is just a game, after all. Who can watch and O. J. Simpson Rose Bowl performance in this day and age without seeing him as just a guy who was on trial once? Who looks at Lebron James without thinking of him as a college-no-show?
Perhaps this is a little grand, a little too far fetched. Cinderella Man is just a boxing movie. Perhaps James Braddock is just a footnote getting another moment in the sun: a true cinderella story, in the end. Howard’s movie is good, and if you just want to be entertained and have a laugh, it is far better than anything else that is in theatres right now (believe me, I know). Certainly, it is the only film yet released in 2005 that has a prayer of being remembered for anything other than George Lucas finally hammering that final(?) nail home; boy, did he hammer us with it. Maybe that’s all you need to expect from Cinderella Man, from any movie: not a great cultural phenomenon, just a good time. Go see Cinderella Man, and let a good time from good film-making be enough...
Then go see On the Waterfront and sit in awe of something Cinderella Man echoed but could not hope to achieve (ok, ok, too much, forget this last sentence).