Stephen Merchant (2019)
The real-life wrestling star Paige in Fighting with My Family is an interesting role for Florence Pugh at this stage of her burgeoning screen career. Pugh made her cinema name in the British arthouse hits The Falling (2014) and Lady Macbeth (2016). On television last year, she gave the standout performance in Richard Eyre’s mostly disappointing King Lear (as Cordelia) before playing the title character in Park Chan-wook’s version of The Little Drummer Girl. As John le Carré’s Charlie Ross, a radical theatre actress recruited as a double agent, Pugh was even more magnetic than the plot was incomprehensible – her command amazing for an actor in her early twenties. At the end of 2019, she’ll be part of a stellar cast in the latest Hollywood adaptation of Little Women. Yet here she is in an apparently run-of-the-mill sporting biopic-dramedy – and the ‘sporting’ is arguable since the sport in question is wrestling, WWE Inc-style. It’s good to know that Florence Pugh, surely now in a position to choose projects, evidently isn’t a cultural snob.
She seems to be slumming it in Fighting with My Family, even so. Pugh’s portrait of Paige – the professional name of Saraya-Jade Bevis – is appealing and impassioned but you never believe this is a girl from a rough background. (Her father has done time for violent crime. Her mother lived on the streets and was a drug addict while still a teenager.) Over the closing titles, the writer-director Stephen Merchant shows the nowadays obligatory footage of the real-life inspirations for the dramatis personae. Once you see these originals, you can see that all the main actors – Nick Frost and Lena Headey as Paige’s parents, Patrick and Julia; Jack Lowden as her brother, Zak – were couther than the real thing are. Even the family dog in the film looks faintly middle-class compared with his actual counterpart. But Florence Pugh, with a lighter regional accent than the others, stands out as socially a cut above the rest of the family from the start – well before Paige is confirmed as special in other ways.
Thanks to the ‘extra something’ that WWE coach Hutch Morgan (Vince Vaughn) sees in her on a talent-spotting visit to London, Paige is transported from her home in Norwich to a training programme in Florida. In terms of plot, Fighting with My Family is essentially formulaic; once Paige crosses the Atlantic, the required stages of the road to fame and fortune become more starkly apparent. The homesick protagonist feels as if she’s on another planet and its inhabitants give her a hard time. The diminutive Paige, with her Goth look and English voice, can’t get on with the tall, tanned, blonde Americans at the training camp (Kim Matula, Aqueela Zoll, Ellie Gonsalves) nor they with her – not, at least, after a light-hearted first meeting (‘You sound just a like a Nazi in a movie,’ says one of the Amazons, ‘ I love it’). The cynical, demanding Hutch Morgan keeps telling Paige she should quit. That’s what she’s decided to do by the time she returns to Norwich for the Christmas break. Her parents reluctantly accept her decision but a key conversation with Zak changes her mind. Back in Florida, Paige’s relationships with the other girls are transformed and she develops the physical strength needed for Morgan’s gruelling training sessions. Almost as suddenly, she’s competing for the WWE ‘Divas Championship’, against the title-holder A J Lee (Thea Trinidad). Paige wins.
There’s good reason, of course, for Stephen Merchant to adopt the competitive-victory-against-the-odds formula. This kind of storyline, unless it’s ineptly handled (and it isn’t here), makes for a particularly enjoyable form of suspense: you’re worked up enough to be anxious for the plucky hero/heroine to succeed while being sure deeper down that they will. Besides, it’s emotionally rousing to watch Paige’s family watch her win (the title bout is part of the weekly ‘WWE Raw’ live broadcast, presumably available on satellite TV), and to register the brief eye contact between Paige, as she leaves the scene of her triumph, and Morgan, standing in a corridor. No words are spoken but her look recognises that she’d never have made it if he hadn’t pushed her so hard, goaded her so relentlessly. (He just about smiles back.) But Fighting with My Family engages too in the ways that it doesn’t conform to type.
The title, taken from a 2012 documentary about Paige (The Wrestlers: Fighting with My Family, directed by Max Fisher) gives a clue to this. It isn’t really a pun. Paige has arguments with her parents and brother in the course of story but the ‘with’ refers more to a sense of solidarity and shared purpose. Wrestling is fundamental to the family, and has been for some time. It got Paige’s parents, after their seriously troubled youth, back on track. Both successful wrestlers (‘Rowdy Ricky Knight’ and ‘Sweet Saraya Knight’), they founded the World Association of Wrestling (WAW) in Norwich in 1994, putting on promotions and running a training school. (The WAW Academy is now Europe’s longest running wrestling school.) In the film’s prologue, ten-year-old Zak (Thomas Whilley) and his younger sister Saraya (Tori Ross) argue over what television channel to watch: he wants to see WWE stuff; she wants the fantasy drama Charmed (among whose main characters Saraya’s favourite is called Paige). The squabbling children, encouraged by their parents, start wrestling each other.
Merchant isn’t starry-eyed about the family’s modus vivendi or the salvific effects of wrestling. Patrick’s elder son (Julia’s stepson) Roy has already had success in the ring but is currently behind bars (James Burrows plays Roy when he comes out of prison, near the end of the film). More important, the dominance of wrestling has naturally limiting effects. When Morgan picks out Paige alone among the group of aspiring wrestlers given a try-out at the O2 Arena, Zak and Paige are astonished that he isn’t selected too. After his sister has gone to Florida, ‘Zak Zodiac’ continues to send video recordings of his training to Morgan in the vain hope of changing his mind. In a distraught phone conversation, Zak tells Morgan he simply has to be a wrestling star because there’s nothing else he can do. (Morgan’s voice solemnly advises Zak to find something else.) Fighting with My Family is nevertheless distinctive in that the star-to-be isn’t struggling to get away from a background that constrains their unexpected talents. Paige’s story is much more about sustaining and building on a family tradition.
It’s biopically unusual too that Paige doesn’t get romantically involved at any stage – or even turn suitors away because she’s dedicated to her art. You don’t experience this as a gap in the story, thanks to the sister-brother relationship being so strong. Florence Pugh isn’t the only exceptional young actor in the cast: Jack Lowden gives another impressive performance. Zak’s response to not being picked by Morgan at the O2 audition is convincing. The initial shock delays the reaction – Zak seems graceful and generous in defeat, pleased for his sister’s success. What the rejection means, seeps in longer term – startlingly so in a sequence where Zak’s girlfriend Courtney (Hannah Rae) gives birth to their first child. The new father smiles at his newborn son then looks away, his thoughts elsewhere and disappointment clouding his face.
Lowden is always expressive but there’s a stretch of the film where Zak’s situation starts to pall. Merchant shows his mute dismay too often. When he turns to drink and gives up training younger wrestlers, it’s a standard-issue decline; when he realises his life on the lower rungs of the wrestling ladder has value after all, the film expects him to snap out of his depression mechanically. (Zak’s students include a blind teenager (Jack Gouldbourne) and another lad (Mohammad Amiri) who, if he wasn’t wrestling, would be pushing drugs.) This routine stuff is interrupted, however, by an upsetting episode when Paige comes back to Norwich for Christmas. Her parents put on a match between her and her brother – a match she’s meant to win. Too bitterly angry to let this happen, Zak goes off script. Jack Lowden is so deeply in character that there’s ambivalence even in Zak’s celebration of Paige’s climactic triumph. Lowden’s face shows pain as well as delight: Zak’s sense of failure, sharpened by Paige’s success, will never go away entirely.
The early stages of Fighting with My Family, with a regular supply of passable but obvious gags, tend to the sitcomical. No one’s playing is more that way inclined than Stephen Merchant’s own, as Courtney’s genial but prim father (Julia Davis is his matching wife). Perhaps this is why the acting at the start lacks orchestration. Nick Frost and Lena Headey are OK but they push for laughs in a way that Florence Pugh and Jack Lowden don’t (as a result, the youngsters are consistently funnier). The later exchange of one-liners between Paige and Morgan, easily and expertly played by Vince Vaughn, works much better. Some of Merchant’s visual storytelling is basic – Paige saying a tearful farewell to her parents at the airport, cut to a plane taking off, cut to freeway traffic – but I liked his descriptions of the training sessions, especially in Norwich. These give an illuminating picture of the amount of athletic discipline and effort that goes into the creation of rabble-rousing WWE showbiz. For those more in the know than this viewer about wrestling, there are guest appearances by several famous names in the sport. Even I’ve heard of Dwayne Johnson, who appears several times as himself. When Paige and Zak bump into him just before their trial at the O2, Zak makes the most of the amazing encounter to keep asking The Rock questions, while the latter keeps thinking their conversation is over. It’s a lovely bit of comedy credibly rooted in (Zak’s) character.
For all that she’s too classy for Paige, Florence Pugh has real presence. Her timing, comic and dramatic, is a delight. One of her co-stars in Greta Gerwig’s Little Women will be Meryl Streep and watching a basically miscast Pugh in Fighting with My Family reminded me of Pauline Kael’s negative review of Streep’s performance in Silkwood (1983). This included the following:
‘Meryl Streep has been quoted as saying, “I’ve always felt that I can do anything.” No doubt that’s a wonderful feeling, and I don’t think she should abandon it, but she shouldn’t take it too literally, either. … Part of being a good movie actress is in knowing what you come across as.’
I’m not sure Kael’s criticisms have stood the test of time. Any actor is more persuasive as some characters than as others but Streep’s extraordinary longevity and reputation, and by now her popularity, owe something to her undiminished appetite for taking on an unusually wide range of roles. She seems to have continued to believe – and, I think, has made increasing numbers of viewers, believe – she ‘can do anything’. It’s premature to compare her with Meryl Streep but if Florence Pugh has and retains a similar kind of self-belief there’s an awful lot to look forward to.
7 March 2019
