The Boxer’s tale

“There is no point of get­ting a pro­mo­tion on the day of your breakup.” — Chetan Bha­gat [ Thanks Irshaad for this quote ! ]. Jim Brad­dock was in the rings not to attain cham­pi­onship but to keep his rela­tion­ships together and taken care.

 What dri­ves the peo­ple to do some­thing? Which trig­gers a man to work hard and get a place where he can breathe, have meals and sleep peace­fully? On all the trig­gers [ Wife, Fam­ily, Kids ], poverty makes the show run­ning. Unpaid bills, unpaid mort­gages, expec­ta­tions from the fam­ily — all these makes a man to run, earn, work and some­times “BOXING”. Yes! When a com­mon man’s life  has some smaller events, how about a great boxer’s life?

 Sports movies — Not all sports are very inter­est­ing to watch in a film. A cricket match is tough to be edited in screen [ Lagaan and Chennai-28 are excep­tional ]. The sim­ple thing for a direc­tor is to show a race and the hero wins [ Bike, Rekla, rik­shaw :) ]. The tough thing is to por­tray a true sports­man on the screen. One such dan­ger­ous and tough­est sport is box­ing. That the box­ing that was hap­pen­ing in 1930s.

 Hol­ly­wood has got more on-screen box­ers and as much as 50 movies were made with box­ing as the sports theme — Kirk Dou­glas [ Spar­ta­cus hereo — Father of Michael Dou­glas :) ], Sylvester Stal­lone, Bruce Willis, Will Smith, Robert-de-niro, Rus­sell crowe, Hilary Swank [ Mil­lion Dol­lar baby ] are the few actors that come to my mind, as box­ers. They didn’t act like box­ers but they pro­fes­sion­ally trained them­selves in box­ing. Robert de niro almost became a pro­fes­sional mid­dle weight boxer — that’s the ded­i­ca­tion he showed for the film ‘Rag­ing bull’ [another masterpiece! ].

 Plot :

The story hap­pens in the 1920s dur­ing the great depres­sion times. James Brad­dock from NJ was an upcom­ing boxer. He faces an injury in the hand and seri­ous defeat. This makes his life more prob­lem­atic as he can­not con­tinue box­ing. Great depres­sion decides the way peo­ple work and their earn­ings. With­out money, he is about to lose his wife and kids — his per­sonal eco­nomic con­di­tion forces him to go back to his for­mer manager.

 Also, he was forced to fight with another dan­ger­ous boxer Max Baer. What hap­pens to Jim, his fam­ily and his box­ing career, makes the rest of the movie.

 View :

 The credit goes to the efforts made by the entire team — Ron Howard, Rus­sell Crowe, Thomas New­man and all. The tough­est part is to recre­ate the sets of 1930s, includ­ing the dark period of the his­tory — great depres­sion. Ron Howard was told about the famous fight between Jim Brad­dock and Baer in his child­hood. Jim was in fact shown as man of bold­ness and care. The script done by Akiva and Cliff was so con­vinc­ing and sparkling.  

 Rus­sell crowe — One of the finest and gifted actors who can live the char­ac­ter. The body lan­guage, expres­sions, man­ner­isms and espe­cially the pain — he did an excel­lent job in this film. In one instance, Jim was pen­ni­less and lit­er­ally begs money from his old friends to pay the elec­tric­ity bill. The pain, insult and sus­tain­abil­ity was extra­or­di­nar­ily expressed by Rus­sell. The poverty in depres­sion might be a com­mon ele­ment but it was ele­gantly used in this film. Sim­i­larly, the bet­ter half of Jim — the char­ac­ter Mae was done by Renee Zel­wgere[ like her in me, myself and irene :) ]. The sup­port­ing actor Paul Gia­matti did a won­der­ful job in this film. The best which can be com­pared to the char­ac­ter of Joe Pesci, enacted in Rag­ing Bull.

 The film has a song which describes the depres­sion and there’s a song in the movie about the depression.

 “Sure, busi­ness is bunk,
 And Wall Street is sunk,
 We’re all of us broke, and ready to croak.
 We’ve noth­ing to dunk,
 Can’t even get drunk,
 And all the while, they tell us to smile:

Here comes the music of Cin­derella man.. All along, I was grow­ing with the BGM done by IR and by ARR at later stages. Mysskin was the first one to intro­duce Brave heart’s sound­track to me and lis­ten. It was amaz­ing! I still like the BGM done by James Horner in Brave heart and Titanic. Sim­i­larly, after watch­ing ‘The Shaw shank redemp­tion’, I became a fan of Thomas New­man. He has a got a great list of movies to admire about his work [ Find­ing nemo, Wall-E, Road to perdi­tion etc ]. He has done a fab­u­lous work in this mov­ing movie. It’s the per­fect score for an emo­tional drama. Warn­ing : We’ll take up Thomas New­man in a sep­a­rate post.

 The bril­liant box­ing scenes are wor­thy to men­tion about. The film crew has edited the one of the longest cli­maxes in film his­tory — a com­plete box­ing [Enchant­i­ngly edited].

 Happy watch­ing

:)

–Toto.

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