A Heart and Head Pounding Cheer for the Good Guy

Rating: 8/10 (27 June 2005)

"Cinderella Man" is a shameless, old-fashioned sentimental bio-pic. And it works.
As one character says "It ain't about pugilism." But director Ron Howard pounds away at our emotions as much as Russell Crowe pounds his boxing opponents in the ring. Howard doesn't just push every emotional button in telling the amazing story of Jim Braddock, he milks every incident in what is just in its basic outline anyway a heart tugging story of the fall and rise of a decent dad battling the Great Depression. And, through frequent tears, it works.
Despite serious flaws, it works because of the central acting and the period recreation.
Once again Crowe completely transforms himself for a role, not only unsurprisingly physically for the boxing rounds, as he spends a good part of the movie in nothing but trunks, and with a hard-scrabbled Joisey accent, but as a devoted, romantic family man. Crowe certainly sets a new standard of portraying masculinity on the screen as equally about being a devoted and responsible husband and father even while engaging in the most physical of occupations. The closest we've seen him reveal the other side was briefly in "The Insider," but we've never seen him play such an unassuming good guy, such that scenes when Braddock has to put aside his masculine pride to provide for his family are staggeringly moving. His frequent gentle giant interaction with the wonderfully natural young children, in particular, are almost too sweetly touching.
He is so captivating that you can see most of the actors in one-on-one with him rise to his level. Paul Giamatti as his manager matches him in duets as they ping pong concentration and humor.
Renée Zellweger with a wandering Jersey accent, though, doesn't have much to do in her passive loyal wife scenes with him and is actually stronger when she gets to flex some separate personality or where briefly there's some flare of conflict with her husband. Crowe's intensity envelops both of them, as we see her melt more beautifully here than we've seen her on film in years.
Surrounding Crowe like a Daumier tableau are marvelous character actors whose faces seem to be out of the gritty boxing game classic "Body and Soul."
It is like two films. One is a sweet Father Courage tale bathed in beautifully golden brown chiaroscuro by cinematographer Salvatore Totino that makes you feel you are looking at tinted photographs from the 1930's, complimented by marvelous costumes from individuals to the crowd scenes. But then he equally puts us directly in the ring, as brutally as he captured football in "Any Given Sunday" and you do feel every punch, such that you involuntarily grunt out loud. Helped by the masterful editing by Howard's usual partners Daniel P. Hanley and Mike Hill you also get inside Braddock's state of mind in each fight, a sympathetic technique I don't recall from other boxing films, including "Raging Bull." Giamatti's chattering, in combination with the ring side announcers, explains the basics of the sweet science to seamlessly help you see the strategy with each competitor so they are not just repetitive slug fests but are each exciting matches.
But what probably leads people to be able to criticize the Max Baer portrayal as unidimensionally villainous, which I don't think it is, is that so much of the period context is missing in the film or selectively stuck in, particularly as we haven't seen too many urban Depression movies and certainly not recently. Howard deliberately avoided the Ken Burnsian technique used so effectively in "Seabiscuit" of editing in newsreel footage or photographs to get across the impact of the Depression. Instead we literally get one headline on a fallen newspaper.
The limited exposition, unfortunately, is put in the mouth of Paddy Considine, as a fictional unemployed broker turned drunken longshoreman and sometime vaguely Socialist community organizer and his dialog and role are just confusing and clumsily inserted. While the bulk of the film takes place 1933- 1935 when the New Deal was just getting off the ground, his stilted mouthing of working class resentments and activist solutions makes Braddock's apolitical responses sound practically Republican, as Braddock, in not seeing a governmental role in either the causes or the solutions, more than once refers to the Depression as a natural phenomenon, as if the docks are the Dust Bowl (and this is the best documentation of the actual work of grappling-hook wielding longshoremen since "On the Waterfront" as that accidentally was Braddock's training regimen). The Hooverville in Central Park where Considine somehow ends up is factual, but Mayor LaGuardia did not send in violent cops to break it up; instead the squatters were given work in WPA-type projects.
There's certainly no sense of the desperate optimism attached to Roosevelt's ambitious government employment plans (including bailing out the overwhelmed state home relief offices that Braddock pridefully detests applying to) as if showing how FDR used radio as a lifeline to stir people (and my mom still enthuses how those fireside chats were inspiring) would undercut the visual images of people listening to Braddock's fights.
The lack of period context is not helped by the music. While Thomas Newman's score is effective at building the tensions with each fight, particularly the throbbing percussion, it is simply odd that virtually only one period song is heard on the soundtrack, and the same cynical Eddie Cantor song is used twice, unlike the series "Carnivale" which so effectively set the mis en scene with music, or how T. Bone Burnett could have advised, though again perhaps Howard didn't want anything else on his radio other than fight broadcasts.
Despite Howard's manipulative schmaltz that almost drowns the film, it is impossible to come out without cheers and tears and pride in basic human goodness.