An Involving Movie In the Face of Its Otherwise Hackneyed Substance

Rating: 7/10 (6 May 2011)

American cinema in the 1970s was marked by the new generation of filmmakers' bombshell of originality, liveliness, sexuality and a fervor for the artistic importance of film itself, with a pervading emphasis on realism, subversive political themes and sexual candor. But what won Best Picture in the year of Taxi Driver, Network and All the President's Men---the legendary arguable masterpieces of three of contemporary cinema's finest directors---is this paint-by-numbers inspirational sports flick. Stallone's screenplay is the most wholesome 1930s Hollywood fantasy. It's the tale of Rocky and his girl Adrian, when he, because of conditions too irrational to go into, is given the chance to fight the world heavyweight champion, Apollo Creed, fashioned after Muhammad Ali so sketchily as to be a practically senseless misuse of character. It's not sufficient enough to even be defamation, but by making the Ali-like fighter such a garish fool, the film treads regions of undeveloped racism that might not be all that undeveloped.
There are intermittent twinklings that the film may be condescending to the subordinate end of the proletarian attitude, as much if not more than the characters who continue putting Rocky down, like Gazzo's bodyguard and the (black) boxer who taunts Rocky after usurping his locker. Then again, Avildsen is known for creating such indistinctness with films he made before such as Joe---which dealt with what mainstream film hadn't yet dared about the neutral depiction of overt racists, junkies and gritty urban living---and the great Save the Tiger, which punctured stereotypes and sought longingly and urgently for answers to the seeming moral predicaments of modern times. Rocky is a devolution of that thread.
However, there are some extremely fine actors in other supporting parts. Burt Young is convincing as Rocky's best friend, a drunk jerk, as is a both deservedly Oscar-nominated and very underused Burgess Meredith as Rocky's antiquated trainer. It's actually Shire who comes off the best, Coppola's sister and Connie in his Godfather saga. She's a genuine actress, truly moving and also droll as a budding bachelorette who comes behind schedule to sexual life. She's so effective, actually, that she almost adds credence to Stallone's performance, which is frankly way too goofy. (I keep getting the impulse to mock him out loud in that mongoloid exaggeration of Italian-American brute brogue.) So Rocky, by day, is a petty debt collector for a neighborhood loan shark played by Joe Spinell. Rocky's the kind of character who evinces his genuine compassion by thinking twice about breaking a stakeholder's thumb. At night, as we all by now very well know, chases a substandard boxing career in rundown sporting rings. But consider when Shire sits, crying and furrowed, in a corner of her small bedroom. Her brother has wrecked the living room with a baseball bat. Rocky, the guy she has become smitten by, enters. She timidly asks him if he wants a roommate. "Absolutely," he says, which is precisely what he should say, and how he should say it, and why Rocky is such an involving movie despite its otherwise ultimately stale framework.