David Gordon Green (2017)
Jeff Bauman lost his legs in the terrorist attack on the 2013 Boston Marathon. ‘Boston Strong’, the slogan created in response to the attack, inspired the title of Bauman’s memoir, written with Bret Witter and published the following year. David Gordon Green’s film of the same name stars Jake Gyllenhaal as Bauman and has a screenplay, based on the latter’s book, by John Pollono. Stronger, in spite of receiving mostly good reviews, has performed miserably at the North American box office. It was released in the US on 22 September and, three months later, has recouped only a fifth of its $30m production budget. It’s snotty to say so but I think Stronger’s commercial failure is evidence that, though no masterpiece, it’s an unusually equivocal and a better than average triumph-of-the-human-spirit story.
Until 15 April 2013, Jeff Bauman worked roasting chickens at the Costco supermarket in Boston and had a reputation for failing to keep his word. This led to the break-up of his relationship with his girlfriend, Erin Hurley. Stronger begins with their chance meeting up again in a local bar, a couple of days before Erin (Tatiana Maslany), a hospital administrator, is due to run the Boston Marathon for charity. Jeff gets everyone in the bar to sponsor Erin and tells her he’ll be at the finishing line, cheering her on. On the day itself, Jeff is late setting off but arrives at the appointed place just in time to be caught up in the bomb blast, which occurs as Erin enters the last mile of her race. The first she sees of Jeff is on a television screen, from which it’s evident that he’s been seriously injured. Later the same day, surgeons amputate both his legs at the knee.
The attack carried out by the brothers Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev is life-changing for Jeff Bauman in more ways than one. When he regains consciousness, he’s able to give the police a description of one of the Tsarnaevs, whom he saw putting what turned out to be an explosive device in a waste bin near the marathon finish line. (Jeff also featured in one of the most famous images of the Boston outrage – a photograph, originally published in the New York Times, which showed him being wheeled away from the site of the attack by a paramedic, a race steward and a middle-aged man in a cowboy hat.) After being fitted with prosthetic lower limbs and completing the early stages of his rehabilitation, Jeff makes special appearances at events like a major ice-hockey match played by the Boston Bruins. He becomes, in short, a celebrity hero. David Gordon Green explores intelligently the chasm between Jeff’s public image and the ordeals he suffers privately in the months following the marathon attack.
Green conveys particularly well the difficult truth that an appalling family tragedy can give new focus and excitement to the lives of those immediately affected. Jeff lives with his alcoholic mother Patty (Miranda Richardson), who seems to do not much more than drink, smoke and watch daytime television. What happens to Jeff reinvigorates Patty: she not only supports and encourages him; she also sets up an Oprah Winfrey interview for her son – a convergence with superstardom beyond Patty’s wildest dreams. The events of April 2013 also revive, in a different way, the relationship between Jeff and Erin Hurley. It’s a grim irony that Jeff, whose reliable unreliability had been too much for her, was ‘there for Erin’ on the day of the marathon. Green and Tatiana Maslany show, mostly without recourse to spoken expressions of Erin’s guilty feelings, her continuing awareness of this. The proposed Oprah interview is a pivotal moment in the story. Erin and Patty have both tried to keep a lid on their mutual resentment but this causes an open disagreement – and Jeff to admit that he’s had enough of the limelight. Patty, resentful of Erin’s influence on Jeff and disappointed at being denied her Oprah moment, goes back on the bottle. Jeff often joins her, at the expense of physical therapy sessions scheduled for the morning after the heavy night before.
I’ve not seen Our Brand is Crisis (2015) but I loathed David Gordon Green’s two previous films, Joe (2013) and Manglehorn (2014), so his well-judged handling of this tricky material comes as a pleasant surprise. The gruesome physical realities of Jeff’s condition are often tough to watch but they’re thoughtfully and sometimes imaginatively done – especially a hospital sequence in which nurses change the dressings on what remains of Jeff’s legs. Green presents this as a single take, with the camera behind Jeff, whose face, turned to one side, is in the foreground of the shot and whose bandaged stumps are in the background. Jeff experiences agonising pain as the dressings are carefully unwound (that word looks almost like a pun). He doesn’t cry out but he repeatedly gasps and grimaces. He survives the undressing of one leg without a more violent reaction but the second half of the process is too much: at the point at which the patient ducks his head to vomit, Green switches camera angle so that Jeff is no longer in full view. There are good illustrations of his desperate recklessness, and its cathartic effects, when he and some mates get drunk and fool around on swings in a children’s playground before, more alarmingly, speeding in a car. Green is disciplined enough to show the immediate aftermath of the bomb explosion, from Jeff’s point of view, in a single flashback sequence rather than as a series of briefer intrusions of memory. Michael Brook’s score is welcome in its unobtrusiveness – and appropriately falls silent during Jeff’s crucial meeting with Carlos Arredondo (Carlos Sanz).
Carlos was the man in the cowboy hat in the New York Times photograph. According to Wikipedia, he ‘was handing out American flags to the runners’ and, after the explosion, ‘quickly jumped over a fence to reach the blast site. Bauman’s shirt which had caught fire, was beat out by Arredondo. He stayed with Bauman and helped carry him on to the ambulance’. In the film, Jeff, when he meets Carlos again, is at his lowest point, unable to cope with his disability, his celebrity or Erin’s news that she’s expecting their baby. She walks out on him because of his reaction to this. What Jeff learns from his conversation with Carlos changes things again, and in a big way. Carlos had two sons, the elder of whom, a US marine, was killed in Iraq. On hearing the news, Carlos attempted suicide. Some time later, the younger son, depressed by his brother’s death and his father’s state of mind, took his own life. Carlos explains that the action he took near the marathon finish line to help save Jeff’s life has helped him begin to expiate his feelings of guilt about the deaths of his sons. The well-acted conversation between Carlos and Jeff is another pivotal moment in Stronger – and a turning point of a familiar kind in screen drama. From here on in, Jeff pulls himself together, stops drinking and engages seriously with his rehab. Shortly after their first meeting, he and Carlos are back together for a joint appearance at a baseball game at Fenway Park, home of Jeff’s beloved Boston Red Sox. Jeff and Erin are eventually reconciled and the closing legends on the screen are a litany of good news. The Red Sox won the 2013 World Series. Jeff and Erin married. She gave birth to a daughter. In 2015 she ran the Boston Marathon again and Jeff was waiting for her at the finish line.
This finale sounds conventionally upbeat – meeting the middlebrow movie requirements of the kind of story Stronger is. (The what-happened-next legends, needless to say, don’t mention that Jeff and Erin divorced in early 2017.) But David Gordon Green has built up a sufficiently robust picture of the conflicts in Jeff Bauman’s life to ensure that the optimism of the closing stages doesn’t come across as facile – is shadowed by what has gone before. Although Carlos Arredondo’s revelations have a transformative effect on Jeff, the sense the viewer gets from these – the sense of a relay of personal tragedy, of passing on the baton of making some good come out of something terrible – stays with you. At the Red Sox game, dozens of people come up to Jeff and tell him he’s given them hope – it’s as if he were a kind of healer. Even as he seems to accept their words, and the way these people see him, we remember an earlier scene in the film, when a couple – a man and woman – approached Jeff in a bar, asked for a photograph and thanked him for ‘not letting the terrorists win’. Perhaps the most startling aspect of this encounter is not Jeff’s smilingly sarcastic and deeply angry response (‘From where I’m sittin’ they at least got on the fuckin’ scoreboard’). It’s that the couple seem oblivious to his anger; they go away happy to have met Jeff and got their photo.
Jake Gyllenhaal, who plays that bar encounter particularly well, isn’t naturally equipped for an unskilled worker/under-achiever role – he radiates a lively intelligence and energy. He was able to subdue his naturally likeable screen persona in Nightcrawler but that film’s protagonist was not just exceptionally creepy; he was, unlike Jeff Bauman, a fictional creation. There are times in Stronger when you wish Gyllenhaal would let his character be harder to like, even though you understand why he feels constrained to do so. Still, he sometimes dares to be petulant and aggressively childish and it’s hard not to admire, as well as his skill, his approach to the role. Gyllenhaal’s integrity makes the performance work: his portrait is rooted in but not smothered by respect for Jeff Bauman. Tatiana Maslany builds on the favourable impression she made in Woman in Gold (2015): her character is underwritten but Maslany is very good at suggesting Erin’s mixed feelings. As Patty, Miranda Richardson’s playing is occasionally theatrical in a way that makes her stick out from others in the cast but her talent for physicalising emotional tension serves her well.
Jake Gyllenhaal’s casting has caused some controversy: why didn’t a physically disabled actor play the role of Jeff Bauman? At one level, it’s hard to argue with this complaint. If the magic of CGI can make Gyllenhaal’s lower legs disappear, it could have supplied an amputee with limb extensions for the early part of the story. When it comes to suggesting particular disabled actors who might have played Bauman, however, things get murkier. Those who’ve criticised the casting of an able-bodied actor will rightly say, of course, that not being able to name specific disabled performers confirms the extent of discrimination against this group. Richard Brody’s New Yorker piece[1] does well to remind us of Harold Russell in The Best Years of Our Lives, seventy years ago but Brody’s suggestion for what Green might have done – ‘… it’s easy to imagine Bauman himself, who’s an engaging and lively presence on TV, playing his own role …’ – is no solution to the issue raised by Stronger. How would casting a non-actor in a dramatic reconstruction of his actual experiences improve the career chances of people with disabilities who want to be professional actors?
This, after all, is what Brody’s piece seems mainly to be concerned with. He also refers to the ‘extraordinary fact’ that ‘as of 2015, fourteen of the previous twenty-seven Best Actor Oscar winners were able-bodied actors who played disabled characters’ and links to an article about this, by Justin Wm Moyer, that appeared in the Washington Post immediately after Eddie Redmayne had won the Oscar for The Theory of Everything. The 14 out of 27 certainly is extraordinary. I can reel off from memory the winners in question and the statistic had me baffled – until I read Moyer’s piece and discovered that the ‘disabled characters’ included, among others, two alcoholics (Nicolas Cage in Leaving Las Vegas, Jeff Bridges in Crazy Heart), a man with OCD (Jack Nicholson in As Good As It Gets), another with a speech impediment (Colin Firth in The King’s Speech), a psychotic (Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs) and two AIDS sufferers (Tom Hanks in Philadelphia, Matthew McConaughey in Dallas Buyers Club). To be fair to Moyer, his piece is humorously perceptive. He not only realises the huge range of ‘disabilities’ involved in the roles in question; he also asks, ‘Isn’t any nuanced lead damaged in some way? Hamlet had no diagnosis, but struggled as much as the hunchbacked Richard III’. (Of course, he’s right. The figure of 14/27 could an easily be updated to 16/29 courtesy of the two Best Actor winners since Redmayne: Leonardo di Caprio’s character in The Revenant is mauled by a grizzly bear and left for dead; Casey Affleck’s Lee Chandler in Manchester by the Sea is incurably traumatised.) But Richard Brody’s bald reference to Moyer’s numbers and the ludicrous implications of the argument Brody uses them to support are unworthy of him, as well as insulting to members of the acting profession who are genuinely disabled. Do actors with drink problems really deserve priority in the casting of dipsomaniacs?
12 December 2017
[1] http://tinyurl.com/y7nrkn7s
