New Releases: Cinderella Man

The Great Depression was a thunderclap that left millions of Americans hat-in-hand, and had it been more brittle and sustained, it could have reignited our nation’s long-dormant revolutionary spirit. For all its significance, though, this period in history is somewhat under-represented in the film canon. The only evocative depression image from American cinema that comes immediately to my mind is the solitary black sharecropper in Bonnie & Clyde, impotently shooting holes in a bank foreclosure sign.

I was more interested in that angle of Cinderella Man than the boxing angle, but sadly, neither angle is very fulfilling. This is a by-the-numbers true story of Jim Braddock, a washed-up Irish palooka in the mid-30s who, after some middling success as a boxer, broke his hand, was de-licensed, and became a dockworker. The early prize money was lost in the stock market, and his family was on the verge of joining the growing breadlines. It was somewhere around this point that Braddock got an unlikely shot at the title and walked away with it.

After the Beautiful Mind debacle, we aren’t really prepared to accept everything we see in Cinderella Man at face value, but from what I know, no skeletons have been broomed away. It is as it was, as the Pope said.

All hope depends on the acting of three talented performers: Russell Crowe as Braddock, Renee Zellweger as Braddock’s saintly and suffering-in-silence wife, and Paul Giamatti, who plays Braddock’s manager/promoter. He has one good scene involving a fancy apartment, which I thought worked in an old-school way, but most of the dialogue in the film feels period-inauthentic and slapdash. Giamatti does a good job with what he has; every time the movie steps up to his level, we get the feeling that he is able to punch above his weight. Also, kudos to Ron Howard on the casting of Art Binowski as boxer Corn Griffin; this is a guy you could look at all day.

Braddock’s dark half in the film is Max Baer, the famously flamboyant Jewish heavyweight champion of the world, and a murderously hard puncher. Baer’s life story was far more interesting than Braddock’s: he wore a giant Star of David on his boxers, and was used by his promoters to stir up anti-Nazi agitation during the war years; after leaving boxing, he became a character actor in the movies; perhaps you’ve enjoyed his work as Grappler McCoy in Africa Screams or Hippo Jones in Ladies’ Day.

Baer is also remembered for an aggressively clownish personality, which Craig Bierko plays in the film as demonic. Instead of an amiable cad, here he is a swivel-eyed moonbat. Whichever was closer to the truth, boxing historians say he developed the jokey kitsch after being badly shaken by killing another boxer in the ring earlier in his career. (It wasn’t the only time.) The best scene in Cinderella Man comes when Jim Braddock is forced, for insurance purposes, to watch a reel of Baer punching an opponent so hard that his brain is dislodged from its connective tissues, and he simply falls to the mat, prostrate and dead. Braddock has to acknowledge out loud what he has just seen.

The fight scenes in the film are well-choreographed, but nothing special. They don’t come close to the artistry of Raging Bull, but they do convey one of the most important elements of boxing: the stamina required just to keep one’s arms held up for sustained periods of time. Salvatore Totino also has a tendency to put his camera too close to the principals during moments of quick movement, and it makes you feel a little disoriented, in a bad way (or maybe I shouldn’t have sat in the front row for a boxing movie)

I give Ron Howard a lot of leeway; at least he’s making biopics about interesting people, which is more than most directors these days. He also has a touch of the master, George Stevens, with his flair for gigantism and for employing heavy-duty equipment. He rocked a Panavision Super 70 in his first Irish boxing movie, Far and Away, which most people didn’t like, but I did. Who knows what he will bring to the table when he begins filming East of Eden next year.

But he would be well-advised to cut loose of Akiva Goldsman, a screenwriter who strangles sap out of every syllable and seems not to care that the audience is wise to his sawdust-sneezing mechanics. Every time the "best friend" character appeared in Cinderella Man, audience members at my showing turned to their Blackberries. His eventual death scene sparked an instant whisper-campaign: Who was that guy again? Oh yeah, the best friend.

There’s something askance about Goldsman’s whole approach; everything in the universe of this film revolves around the main character. When we see Braddock visiting the infamous Hooverville slums in Central Park, the mise en scene turns to horror: faces peer out of shanty shacks, drunken brawlers eyeball Jim threateningly, and a rampaging horse nearly kills him. The idea of this scene is that Jim is in danger; he could just as easily be in a biker bar. It has nothing to do with Hooverville itself. Maybe this explains Goldsman’s steady work - he has found a way to internationalize non-action movies.

One final note: a lot of the early buzz mentioned remarkable similarities between the screenplay of this film and that of Rocky. After seeing the film for myself, I would advise Sylvester Stallone to consult an attorney. Similarity is putting it charitably. There are passages in this film that jerk you out of the story, because you remember that you’ve seen this before. And, tellingly, not just from the first Rocky. There are explicit rip-offs from Rocky III as well, which I would be happy to elaborate on, if pressed into action by our civil court system.