I was born in '34, and this film made me think of what my parents went though. I was lucky, my father kept his job all though the 30's [retired in '65 after 45 years with the same company] while many lived like Braddock.
Further Thoughts on ‘Cinderella Man’: Sobriety over Sentimentality
Libertas blog
Govindini wrote this excellent review yesterday of the Ron Howard/Russell Crowe film Cinderella Man, which we caught at a private screening a few weeks ago. I wanted to add a few thoughts on the matter to those of you who might be skeptical - as I was - about this film being yet another maudlin, leaden Hollywood exercise in ‘uplift.’ It isn’t. Universal’s marketing campaign has been somewhat misleading about this picture - making it appear much more conventional than it really is.
What was so remarkable about Cinderella Man was its sobriety, rather than its sentimentality. Cinderella Man is really about an entirely different generation of American - the generation that suffered through the deprivations of the Great Depression. The film is not really about boxing at all - at least, not in the way that Rocky or Raging Bull or Kirk Douglas’ Champion dwell in the sport and its daily rituals. Cinderella Man is about a man’s hard-scrabble existence, enduring excruciating penury, as he lives hand-to-mouth on earnings he takes from his fights. Director Ron Howard does not sugarcoat what this must have been like for the real-life Jim Braddock - and the movie’s most absorbing sequences are the quiet moments when Braddock and his wife must reckon with how to keep their children fed, how to keep electricity flowing into their freezing apartment, and how to sustain some sense optimism about their lives.
This film sobered me, as much as it inspired me. We take so much for granted in this country! Our ’sufferings’ and ‘problems’ are so trite in comparison to what our grandparents must have dealt with, struggling through these lean years only to face Hitler and Tojo shortly thereafter.
At every moment in this film, when Howard could’ve taken the easy way out - slipped in an ‘inspirational’ line, a saccharine music cue - he throws a bucket of cold water in your face. He wants you to know how tough it was to live Jim Braddock’s life - to stay clean and honest and still to win in these difficult years. And what holds everything together in this film is Russell Crowe - Russell Crowe! Is he the Last Man we have? Is it left to Crowe alone to remind us of what men used to be like? Tough, disciplined, complex, emotional? Crowe is not an especially handsome mug in this film - he looks lean and fit, but he has no ‘abs,’ no bulging ‘pecs,’ he really just looks like a normal guy. But Jimmy Stewart looked like a normal guy, and so did Spencer Tracy and John Garfield. And by the way, so did Marlon Brando - playing boxer Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront. That’s who I thought of, watching Crowe. He has that kind of gravity to him, because one senses that Crowe’s toughness is a matter of character, rather than flesh and bone.
If you’re a conservative, and you care about movies, you should go out and support this film. It will satisfy you aesthetically as well as morally. If you don’t go, don’t come back to LIBERTAS complaining that Hollywood can’t put out a good movie anymore. For the long summer months ahead, this one will suit you just fine.
Final footnote: I should also mention some great supporting performances in this film by Paul Giamatti as Braddock’s trainer, Craig Bierko as Max Baer, and Bruce McGill as boxing impressario Jimmy Johnston. |
