Best Movie of 2005

Rating: 10/10 (6 February 2006)

The best picture of 2005 and Russell Crowe should be the Best Actor. This story of former heavyweight champion Jim Braddock is superbly told with remarkable accuracy but it also is a history lesson. Most viewers don't have a clue as to how bad it was during the Great Depression but this movie will give them a clue. It would have been better except that a very revealing scene wound up on the cutting room floor during the director's cuts.
In that scene, Braddock joins his family who are standing in a soup line. The significance of the scene is not that they are in a soup line but that Braddock has his boxing shoes hanging around his neck. After Braddock goes through the soup line, he then goes to his old gym to sell the shoes. He tries to get a dollar for them but he is so desperate he ends up selling them for a quarter. But the scene is also significant for another reason and should have been left in the movie.
When he sells his shoes, his manager is lurking in the background and sees the sale and he knows Braddock is giving up fighting. Later, the manager is able to get Braddock a fight and when Braddock, who needs the money desperately, agrees, the manager gives him a pair of shoes. Because the earlier scene was cut, viewers are left guessing as to how the manager knew that Braddock needed the shoes.
Another directors cut presents the same dilemma. Early in the movie, Braddock breaks his hand during a fight and the fight winds up a draw and he does not get paid. He is flat broke. Yet when he gets home his hand is in a cast and the cast is significant in the movie. The viewer has to wonder how did Braddock pay for the cast when he is so broke? What was cut was a scene in which after the fight, we see Braddock's manager prepare a splint and bandage up the hand for a cast. That scene should have been left in the movie.
Director Ron Howard made few mistakes and these were two . But he was smart enough to get former heavyweight boxing manager Angelo Dundee not only as an adviser but a role in the movie. It improved the realism immensely. And if the viewer has watched the actual films of Braddock's championship fight, the viewer can see how realistically the fight was duplicated in the movie. For a rank amateur Crowe did a superb job of boxing.
I am not a fan of Renée Zellweger. I usually can't stand her but she was perfectly cast as Braddock's wife and she plays the part exceptionally well.
One omission in the film. Max Baer, the heavyweight champion Braddock defeated, always wore a big Star of David on the left leg of his boxing trunks. Baer did this to show support of the Jews who were being badly persecuted in Nazi Germany at the time. It wasn't seen in the movie. The movie makes Baer out to be a very obnoxious person and possibly Howard was concerned that it would be considered anti-Semitic to make Baer look like a loud mouthed Jew.
In a way this movie is nostalgic in that I grew up during the Great Depression. However, I was too young to have heard the Baer-Braddock fight. Besides like many at that time, we didn't have electricity so we didn't have a radio. Moreover, Jim Braddock was kind of an in betweener among heavyweight boxers. In between Jack Dempsey, Gene Tunney and Joe Louis. Champions such as Primo Carnera, the Argentine Bull, and German Max Schmelling were more famous and Braddock was a forgotten man until Ron Howard and Russell Crowe resurrected him in Cinderella Man.