Flak Magazine: Review of Cinderella Man, 06.23.05

When considering two of Hollywood's most celebrated collaborators, director Ron Howard and producer Brian Grazer, the only unorthodox thing that comes to mind is Mr. Grazer's hairstyle. Everything else in their films falls naturally into place, whether it's three astronauts taking the long way home in Apollo 13, a Nobel Prize-winning mathematician battling paranoid schizophrenia in A Beautiful Mind, or a down-on-his-luck boxer who gets one last shot in the ring in Cinderella Man. All improbable but uplifting in the same way, all solicitous of tears and cheers in equal measure, all curiously devoid of the painful ambiguity that so stubbornly asserts itself in real life.

Cinderella Man, the latest and most earnest in this tradition of earnestness, isn't a bad, or even flawed, film. On the contrary, it is perhaps the most finely tuned machine of Howard's career. It grows out of a story whose narrative needs little burnishing, and whose invocations of heroism are not foisted on it from our own hero-less times, but supplied, ready-made, from within. Jimmy Braddock's impossible comeback to become the Heavyweight Championship of the World in 1935 provides a justification for Howard's faith in an ideal America, and Cinderella Man is, more than anything else, an act of devotion to the deeply unfashionable concept of the American Dream.

Cinematically, this calls for a satisfying mix of artifice and fidelity. It can be a tad much: The nameless downtrodden of the Depression-era New Jersey wear costumes last laundered during the orphanage song-and-dance in "Annie," boxing managers smoke cigars and wear suspenders, Irish-American priests put radios in the pulpit on fight night, stockbrokers become dockworkers when they lose their dough, and Renée Zellweger channels a de-sexualized Betty Boop. It's not all dress-up, though. As a biting chill invades the Braddock hovel and threatens one of the family's blameless, angelic children, we feel the creeping depravity, dread and helplessness that advanced on the unsuspecting millions in the wake of 1929.

Russell Crowe holds back the tide of ruin as Braddock, the sensitive and determined bruiser at the heart of the story. By now, Crowe is used to portraying men about to engage in deliberate acts of extreme violence, and Cinderella Man, whose fight scenes are the most riveting part of the film, is no exception. Audiences have come to depend on Crowe's toughness since his breakthrough role as Detective Bud White in L.A. Confidential, and we sense that he, too, has come to depend on it as a way of legitimating himself as an action star. But there's palpably more to him than that, a potential for metamorphosis that carried The Insider and nearly saved A Beautiful Mind. Howard doesn't give him much to work with here, because Braddock's character doesn't really evolve, but Crowe gamely makes of it what he can. This gives us the funniest, most human shot of the film: Russell Crowe, his face buried in a plate of hash, scarfing it down like the dog he knows himself to be.

But while Crowe anchors the movie, and Zellweger, as his occasionally nonplussed wife Mae, rounds it out with the requisite and retrograde feminine mystique (although can Howard imagine a female character independent of the man to whom she is attached?), it is Paul Giamatti, as Braddock's manager Joe Gould, who delivers the knockout punch. Even in Howard's films, somebody has to give the appearance of having entertained the possibility of being cynical at least once in their lives, and that job, thank goodness, falls to the schlepping oenophile anti-hero from Sideways.

Here, Giamatti transforms himself into a deft schemer whose desperation is all the more manifest by a need to downplay it. A scene in which Gould and his wife Linda reluctantly entertain Mae in the empty shell of their formerly posh apartment brings this painfully to the fore. Gould, the consummate poseur, calculates where others feel, and it's a testament to Giamatti's performance, held against Crowe's stolid moral purposefulness, that such rationality comes off as legitimate, even heroic. When he barks instructions from Braddock's corner of the mat, Gould never takes his eye off the prize, which is, of course, the moolah. The film's best, and most biting line belongs to him, too: "We both know the name of this game, and it sure as hell ain't pugilism."

While the actors chew up plenty of screen in Cinderella Man — including Craig Bierko's gripping but likely inaccurate portrayal of playboy boxer Max Baer — there's something quietly dogging the fairy tale, and which dogs all fairy tales: politics. To acknowledge that, in the 1930s, some people did in fact try to find a radical political solution to the calamity of the Depression, Howard and his screenwriters depart from history to invent Mike Wilson. In the otherwise capable hands of Paddy Considine, Wilson is, unfortunately, little more than a cipher for the anti-Braddock, a man who thinks too much, drinks too much, and gets too political, dying in a police raid on Hoovertown, that infamous patch of slum erected by the unemployed in Central Park.

Subtle, this isn't. Surely Howard thought that a film about the Depression with no political dimension would be derided as irresponsible, but what he manages here is little more than a token gesture. To boot, his ethical standard-bearer isn't a carpenter, he's "The Bulldog of Bergen," a trained brawler. Faced with a need to make Braddock's boxing morally palatable and not just visually seductive, "Cinderella Man" tells us that this harrowingly violent profession was a viable alternative to political agitation. Beneath the heroic gloss, there's something deeply conservative, even cynical about this ethos. It says that risking your life in the ring is better than risking your life in the world. "You can't punch what you can't see," says Braddock to his doomed friend. If only it were that simple.

— Joshua Adams (joshua at uchicago dot edu)