Flawed, but moving biopic

Rating: 8/10 (5 October 2005)

Readers of some of my comments might guess that I am not terribly impressed with Ron Howard as a producer or director, and that one of his projects will go down in my memory as an insult. So it should tell you a lot about the quality of Cinderella Man that I found it an enjoyable and moving film. It is not without its faults, granted, but its strengths are great enough that this mostly does not matter. I thought that it could have been better if Howard had not resorted to bowdlerising his subject at the expense of an opponent, but as I said to a fellow viewer the night I saw it, it could have been much worse. Like many films that star Russell Crowe, Cinderella Man literally balances itself upon his shoulders, and it gets very comfortable there for once. Crowe has been carrying films on his individual strength since almost the beginning of his career, so it should come as no surprise that he handles this with expert poise. He may have a reputation for being difficult to work with, but he also produces results that are well worth it.
The Great Depression was a time of many things, mostly variations on misery, and Cinderella Man does not let up for one minute in depicting this. The biggest challenge of a film about boxing is giving the central character a reason to box, and this film nails that from the get-go. In an interview before the climactic fight, we hear Braddock tell the press that he is doing the fight because he wants to be able to buy milk. There are few people in today's English-speaking world who know anything resembling such desperation. Most of them only know it because of how they were born a little different to those in power. Anyway, the second challenge of a boxing film is to make the audience feel as if they are part of the match. Howard apparently accomplished this partly by placing a camera in a protective case and having his actors punch that. In other places, he uses the viewpoint of the character, or just films the action from the appropriate angle. Granted, some of the camera-work was a bit on the nose, so to speak, but it was mostly effective. If nothing else, Ron Howard knows how to simulate a fight for a film.
Renée Zellweger gives a surprisingly good performance as Mae, the wife of Jimmy. At one (possibly more) point of the film, she tells Crowe that when he is in the ring being hit, it feels to her like she is being hit. Most of the time, when you hear the long-suffering wife character say something like this, it is comical. That one can fully empathise with Zellweger as she says this in Cinderella Man is testament to how well-scripted and well-acted her scenes with Crowe are. Paul Giamatti also gets to shine as Braddock's manager, Joe Gould. For much of the film, we see Gould as being simply a trainer and facilitator, looking down his nose at the thoroughly working-class Braddock. Then in one amazing scene, we learn just how intense the pinch of the Great Depression really was, and how much Gould really had invested in what he thought up until recently was a man past his prime. In a sense, the film works especially because of how powerful a performance these two put in.
The weak spot in the film is the portrayal of Max Baer. Yes, Max was a mountain of muscle who loved to punch his opponents into submission. Yes, Max killed two men in the ring. Where Cinderella Man errs is that it portrays Max Baer as having bragged extensively about the incident, even to the point of insulting Braddock's wife. Baer's son claims that Baer senior was haunted by the death of his opponent in the ring, and often wept about it. There is some corroboration to this account, but even without it, one has to consider that killing opponents in the ring and bragging about it is bad for a boxer's business. Not to mention that it is difficult to believe a man born in 1937 would say this about his dad if there weren't a fair chunk of truth to it. The essential problem here is that Howard's film portrays Max Baer with no development and no second dimension. He is a caricature, and thus Jimmy Braddock's victory in the climactic scene is lessened by it. I won't go into all the films that have been made better by multidimensional villains, but I was quite disappointed by this lapse. It is shared by all Howard films, which cannot seem to function without the good guys being very good and the bad very bad.
It is for that reason I gave Cinderella Man an eight out of ten. It is not nearly in the same league as Crowe's other riches-rags-riches combat performance, but it is worth a look. With the competition it was up against, in fact, I am surprised it failed to make more money.