Ron Howard (2005)

The story of James J Braddock, dubbed ‘Cinderella Man’ by Damon Runyon during the boxer’s comeback in 1934-35, is rags-to-riches twice over, although Ron Howard’s biopic omits Braddock’s progress from his Hell’s Kitchen upbringing to early success in the ring.  The movie begins with Braddock already well on the way to fighting for the world light heavyweight title and living in style with his wife Mae and their three young children.  Cinderella Man then moves quickly forward to the depths of the Great Depression.   Braddock has lost nearly everything in the Wall Street Crash and a succession of injuries has sent his boxing career into reverse.  He and his family are living on the breadline:  Braddock turns up each morning at the gates of the New York dockyards, with hundreds of other men, in the hope of being one of the few chosen for shift work that day.   When his longstanding manager-trainer Joe Gould gets Braddock a fight at Madison Square Garden against an up-and-coming heavyweight, it’s expected to be a farewell appearance – one that will at least provide a modest payday.  To everyone’s surprise, Braddock wins.  This is the start of the road that will lead to the film’s climax, his shot at the world heavyweight title against the charismatic Max Baer, and an even more astonishing, against-the-odds victory at the Garden.

This is a true sporting fairytale but Ron Howard isn’t a sufficiently imaginative director to make you feel amazed that what you’re seeing on screen really happened.  Much of Cinderella Man consists of boxing movie and Depression-era-struggles movie tropes; although these are executed competently, they root the film in cinematic convention rather than a surprising reality.   Yet Cinderella Man turns out to be very effective, for two main reasons:  Russell Crowe, as Braddock, gives one of his finest performances; and Howard is a good storyteller, who knows how to create emotional excitement.  More words from Damon Runyon appear on the screen at the start of the film:  ‘In all the history of the boxing game you find no human interest story to compare with the life narrative of James J Braddock’.  While this may be true (or may have been true at the time) it doesn’t guarantee dramatic substance – especially as Braddock isn’t a volatile personality.   According to the screenplay by Akiva Goldsman and Cliff Hollingsworth, Braddock’s changing fortunes were not mirrored by changes in behaviour.  Casting Russell Crowe as a pugilist chimed unfortunately with his objectionable off-screen reputation at the time the film was made but Jim Braddock is a fighter only by profession.   He’s a devoted family man at the start; in adversity, he’s a heroically devoted family man.  He never looks at another woman or abuses his wife or children in any way.  He doesn’t have a drink problem or get into drugs or crime when his fortunes are at a low ebb.  Cinderella Man didn’t do great business at the box office (although, according to Wikipedia, the film eventually earned back comfortably more than its budget).  Perhaps audiences were disappointed that the character wasn’t the hell-raiser the star playing him was reputed to be but it’s a tribute to Crowe that he’s sensitively magnetic in the role.   He’s entirely convincing in the fight sequences.  Out of the ring, his characterisation has, like nothing else in the movie, a bracing realness.  There’s a wonderful moment when Jim laughs lovingly, entirely naturally, at something that one of his children says.

Although the story spans the years 1928 to 1935, the three Braddock children don’t appear to age.  In fact, Braddock didn’t marry Mae Fox until 1930.  It’s understandable that Howard and his screenwriters alter history significantly by having the kids around at the start of Cinderella Man.  It allows them to show the happy family when things are going well for Braddock.  Making the kids a few years older than they actually were also means that Howard can use children old enough to act their roles.   But having the Braddocks married ahead of time is tough on Renée Zellweger, who plays Mae.  Just as Jim is a loyal husband and father, so Mae is an utterly supportive and loving wife and mother.  The only continuing tension between her and her husband is her fear that he’ll get injured or worse in the boxing ring.  Mae married Jim after the Crash rather than when he was flying high financially:  if the real timeframe of their relationship had been followed in the movie that might have given Zellweger the opportunity to react to sudden hardship and show what Jim means to her in a more dynamic way.  As it is, she’s playing the same scene too often and, although she’s likeable, her lack of vocal colouring doesn’t help in such an unvarying role.  Paul Giamatti, witty and energetic as the fast-talking Joe Gould, complements Crowe well although you never lose the sense that Giamatti is playing a type of character in a type of movie.  This is all the more true of the minor characters in the boxing world.

On the eve of the big fight, Max Baer, in response to the description of Braddock’s comeback as a fairytale, remarks that, ‘In fairytales, people are always getting killed’.   The main death in Cinderella Man is that of Mike Wilson, a man who does Jim a good turn when they’re on a shift together at the docks (disguising the fact that Braddock has a broken hand) but whose anger at being unemployed turns him to drink and domestic violence.   Paddy Considine is uncomfortable in this poorly conceived role (and his American accent comes and goes).  Rosemarie DeWitt (who is the real Jim Braddock’s granddaughter) has a tortured emotionality as Mike’s wife that seems too much in the context of the film.  Its presentation of Max Baer (Craig Bierko) as a preening, arrogant killer-in-the-ring was controversial but turning Braddock’s final opponent (in the movie) into a flamboyant baddie helps make the climax to Cinderella Man what it is – an emotional triumph.  Whatever else one thinks of the aestheticised fight sequences in Raging Bull they’re compelling cinema.  Ron Howard sensibly doesn’t try to emulate Scorsese; while the action in the ring in most of the film is still involving enough, what’s going on in Braddock’s corner between rounds is a bit stagy.  But everything comes together in the Baer fight, as Howard cuts from the ring to Joe Gould’s desperate ringside urgings, and to various listeners to the radio broadcast – men in a packed bar, the Catholic priest and his congregation at the Braddocks’ church, and Mae, with her sister and children yet affectingly alone.  You do get a sense here that Jim Braddock, because of what he’s gone through and gone on to achieve, has become a hero to other people who’ve suffered in the Depression.   And these are Renée Zellweger’s best, most intense moments:  Mae just wants her husband to survive unscathed – you really fear for his safety too.   You also want him to win, though.   I was pretty sure he had done but Ron Howard doesn’t make the result, or Braddock’s survival, a foregone conclusion.   The last of the fifteen rounds and the long wait for the judges’ verdict are almost unbearable.  I cried out ‘No!’ when Baer landed a big punch shortly before the bell.  I shed tears of relief when the unanimous decision went Braddock’s way.

8 November 2013