Both a richly documented history and a fund of
personal anecdote instruct us in the manifold ways in which the American
government and the American people coped with that disaster of free market
capitalism known as the Great Depression.
The programs of Franklin Roosevelt’s administration
attempted to provide employment to the millions of men and women out of work
and to rejuvenate the economy with a number of ingenious ideas and legislative
actions, the results of which persist in public life today. According to a
couple of recent motion pictures, however, it wasn’t the New Deal that lifted
the spirits of the nation in the face of crushing poverty, hunger, and
hopelessness, but actually a horse and a prizefighter: the horse was Seabiscuit
and the fighter was Jim Braddock, the title figure of Cinderella Man.
Ron Howard’s latest movie, another docudrama in the
vein of A Beautiful Mind, deals with
the domestic and personal difficulties of Braddock (Russell Crowe), a once
promising fighter defeated by injuries, bad luck, and hard times. His boxing
license revoked for poor performance — he had broken his hand and couldn’t
punch — the fighter struggled to support his family through some of the
darkest years of the Depression, shaping up for longshoreman’s work on the New
Jersey docks, applying for home relief (welfare), even pathetically begging
from his former friends to pay his bills.
A reversal of fortune and the dogged determination
of his manager Joe Gould (Paul Giamatti) combine to get him a single fight
against a leading heavyweight. Implausibly — though as Mark Twain pointed
out, life, unlike fiction, has no obligation to be probable — he wins the
fight and launches a comeback, apparently capturing the imagination of the
country in a dark and dispiriting time.
Dubbed the Cinderella Man, he ultimately fights Max
Baer, who had killed two men in the ring and boasted he’d knock off Braddock as
well, and defeats him, winning the heavyweight championship.
The rags-to-riches story, the most common motif in
all of folklore, and certainly a frequent pattern in the boxing flick, in this
instance possesses the rare advantage of historical truth, a real version of
all the Rocky movies. Not
surprisingly, Ron Howard, as is his wont, milks the material for just about all
the tears it will yield, dwelling for unconscionably long periods on Braddock
and his children, Braddock amid the poverty and squalor of his family hovel,
above all, Braddock and his sweetly suffering wife (Renรฉe Zellweger).
Along with their troubles the director provides an
occasional glimpse of the nation’s plight, particularly in a scene in a
Hooverville in Central Park, where in a familiar action the police attack the
homeless and unemployed, killing one of Braddock’s friends.
Aside from the many long scenes of the Dickensian
domestic situation, the director spends an enormous amount of time in the ring,
showing what seems like every round of every big fight. The fight scenes lack
the grace of Sylvester Stallone’s in Rocky and the paradoxically poetic brilliance of conception and execution in Raging Bull, probably the best boxing
film ever made. Instead, the slugging goes on and on, without much variation or
economy of gesture, until even the audience feels a touch punch-drunk.
Despite its attention to authenticity of time and
place, the movie neglects a good deal of the reality of the Great Depression,
suggesting, perhaps inadvertently, that the media of the period distracted
people from real problems by concentrating on sensation stories of heroic
underdogs like Braddock and Seabiscuit (now it’s Michael Jackson and the
Runaway Bride of Georgia): nothing really changes for the manipulators of the
national psyche. Likewise, the director never even hints at the possibilities
of fakes and fixes in the prizefights of an era when professional boxing was
even dirtier and more corrupt than it is today.
The fact that Russell Crowe, of all people, played a
genius in Ron Howard’s A Beautiful Mind and now plays a boxer in his Cinderella
Man would suggest that he is an actor of unparalleled versatility,
impersonating an intellectual and a physical heavyweight.
The rather short, pudgy Crowe, however, rarely
resembles a champion fighter and considerably smaller, less muscular, and less
healthy than the Broadway pretty boy Craig Bierko, who plays the nasty Max
Baer. This long, dull effort may qualify as a biopic, and it may dramatize a
number of actual people and events, but for all its facts, Cinderella Man tends to ignore truth.
Cinderella Man (PG-13) is playing at Pittsford Cinema, Culver Ridge, Eastview,
Henrietta 18.
This article appears in Jun 8-14, 2005.
