Channeling Frank Capra

Rating: Null/10 (28 June 2005)

Cinderella Man is the kind of irresistible malarkey that Hollywood used to be founded on - the kind of cornball triumph-of-the-common man stuff Capra used to peddle, presented with all the slickness modern Hollywood can muster. It's almost impossible not to root for its hero, James Braddock, a punching-bag who becomes Heavyweight Champeen despite being old, broke and saddled with three kids and a nagging wife. And it's almost equally impossible not to snicker at one's own gullibility at being carried along by the movie's tide of populist bull-crap emotion.
Ron Howard is better at this kind of movie than almost anyone, even Spielberg, mostly because with Howard you don't have to worry about any messy imagination getting in the way. Too much original thinking would just bog-down a movie like Cinderella Man, which needs to be all about the surface emotions, and there's no director in Hollywood better qualified to skate along the exterior of a story than Howard. To call Howard proficient would be understating things - he has achieved a level of skill at standard storytelling that can only be described as super-proficient. There isn't a moment of Cinderella Man that doesn't display Howard's command of the medium - and there isn't a moment that doesn't demonstrate his complete mediocrity as a cinematic thinker. They used to call guys like this "shooters" back in the day, directors who knew how to interpret a script without jazzing things up too much. There are moments in Cinderella Man where Howard seems to be injecting a bit of style, but what he's really doing is aping. The boxing scenes may recall Raging Bull for a second or two, but mostly they're just competent. At times the depiction of Depression-era squalor may appear grimly realistic, but there's always a storybook sheen over everything, the sense of reality filtered through a strictly pedestrian, basically clean-minded point-of-view. Howard may seem to want to press the violence, the seedier aspects of the story, but he's too decent and unperverse to really achieve this. There's no sense whatsoever of the real brutality of boxing, just the mock-brutality of movie-boxing filmed so close-in that we can't see how bad the actors' footwork is.
The film revolves around three strong central performances. Russell Crowe brings warmth to Braddock, the lovable lug, and has the right physical presence to capture the character's bruising prowess. Braddock's manager/trainer, Joe Gould, is played by Paul Giamatti with a crackling Lee Tracy sense of verbal acrobatics and timing, his rapport with Crowe becoming almost vaudevillian. And Renee Zellweger plays Crowe's loyal, long-suffering wife Mae with enough of her signature screwy-but-down-to-earth charm to distract us from the fact that the character is basically a fretful stereotype. It's a novelty for three such dynamic performers to find their way into the same movie - yet despite the strength of these performances there is a nagging sense of shallowness to the characterizations. We get to like Jim Braddock, to see his honorable nature and his toughness, but we never get very deep into the character, we never get a sense of the undercurrents of violence and rage that must, at least partly, motivate him. The movie goes out of its way to visualize the character's motivations at key moments, showing us flashes from his miserable home-life while he's knocking the snot out of someone, but this is no more than psychological window-dressing. Crowe is certainly a powerful enough actor to bring us deeper inside Braddock, but the mainstream, audience-friendly conception, and Ron Howard's own populist tendencies, preclude this. The film needs Braddock to be a straight-forward hero, the champion of the common-man, and that is what we are given. The actors only skim the surfaces of their characters, portraying the kinds of emotions that will contribute to the sense of inspiration. It's effective acting but it's not very interesting acting.
The same could be said about the movie as a whole - it's effective but not very interesting. It gets the job done as they say, but the job it's doing is a rather routine, unremarkable one.