Ryan Coogler (2015)

Creed is notable for being made by Ryan Coogler, for Michael B Jordan in the main role and for not having ‘Rocky’ in the title.  This second collaboration of the director and lead actor – following Coogler’s debut feature, Fruitvale Station – is the seventh film in the Rocky series.   It’s the first one not to be written by Sylvester Stallone (who directed four of the previous six, for good measure).  As well as appearing again as Rocky Balboa in Creed, Stallone has produced for the first time – along with two other founder members of the Rocky team, Irwin Winkler and Robert Chartoff.  The latter died in June 2015 but a new generation of Winklers and Chartoffs is now part of the franchise too.  Charles and David Winkler and Billy Chartoff are also producers of Creed – as they were of the film’s immediate predecessor, Rocky Balboa, in 2006.  (Irwin Winkler and Robert Chartoff executive produced that one.)  This new film, because it’s not a bad movie, is a reminder that the first Rocky in 1976 wasn’t a bad movie either.  In order to be more enthusiastic than this about Creed, you probably need to be a dyed-in-the-wool Rocky fan and/or to have seen worse Rockys in between, to allow you to appreciate the relative superiority of Ryan Coogler’s contribution to the canon.  I’m not in either of those groups.

Michael B Jordan plays Adonis ‘Donnie’ Johnson.  Donnie’s the son, from an extra-marital affair, of Apollo Creed – the flamboyant, Muhammad Ali-inspired champion who gave Rocky his first chance to fight for the world heavyweight title in the original film, who then became the hero’s friend as well as adversary, and who died in the ring in Rocky IV.   Donnie had a tough start in life:  his mother died when he was a kid; he’s serving time in a youth detention centre in Los Angeles when Mary Anne Creed (Phylicia Rashad), his father’s widow, takes him in hand.  We next see Donnie in a boxing ring in Mexico but, though he’s won a series of fights there, it’s not how he makes his living – he has a high-powered job in the financial world.  No sooner has he appeared in Creed in a white collar and tie, however, Donnie resigns, to become a professional fighter.  He seeks out Rocky in Philadelphia, where the old-timer is still running the restaurant he opened in Rocky Balboa.  Rocky also keeps in touch with his fight-game contacts at the local Front Street Gym.  Soon Donnie is training there and Rocky is his trainer. To cut a long story short (and Creed, at 133 minutes, is a too long story), Donnie ends up fighting for the world title, light-heavyweight division.  Against a controversial, undefeated champion, Donnie loses on points and heroically – just as Rocky did against Apollo Creed, four decades ago.

You wouldn’t have expected Ryan Coogler’s second feature to be this project but he does a creditable job:  Creed is largely workmanlike but has enough fresh details to assure you it’s not the work of a hack director.  The mostly standard descriptions of preparing for a big fight are occasionally enlivened – for example, in a dynamic sequence in which Donnie is on a training run with an escort on either side of kids reared up on their motorbikes.  The score by Ludwig Göransson (who also did the music for Fruitvale Station) evokes Bill Conti’s famous Rocky music.  Just when you think Göransson’s score is going to turn into Conti’s, Coogler keeps pulling back.  The effect is tantalising, until we get the Rocky fanfare at the start of the climactic title fight.   This takes place in Liverpool, home city of the defending champion, ‘Pretty’ Ricky Conlan, and where the ‘Con-lan, Con-lan’ chant of the crowd ringside sounds right.  (Conlan is played by Tony Bellew, a former world champion and still the EBU champion at cruiserweight.)  The big fight is straightforwardly staged and gruesomely involving.   There’s nothing smart-aleck or meta about Ryan Coogler’s approach.  At the same time, Creed avoids accusations of being formula thanks to the Rocky series being that already: formula is a large part of the fabric Coogler’s working with.  Rocky is diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and eventually persuaded to have chemotherapy.  The description of his treatment is so cursory that it verges on the offensive to anyone who’s been on the receiving end of chemo.  Coogler, who wrote the screenplay for Creed with Aaron Covington, has the wit to redeem this – a bit – in a scene in the hospital room where Rocky is receiving treatment.  It’s so spacious that he encourages Donnie to do some fitness training there while he’s visiting.

As Donnie, Michael B Jordan is easily expressive and very likeable:  he has a real emotional fluidity.  Tessa Thompson is good as Bianca, the aspiring singer-songwriter who becomes Donnie’s girlfriend, although a bust-up at her big-chance set is one of the cruder episodes in the film.  The playing of Creed’s widow by the honoured stage actress Phylicia Rashad is too deliberate for my taste.  Now in his seventieth year, Sylvester Stallone is oddly dignified and occasionally touching in his latest outing as Rocky, though I find it hard to be swept up in the sentimental wave that may land him the Best Supporting Actor Oscar.   This isn’t just a matter of a veteran star enjoying renewed, more or less unexpected attention.  In this case, the actor is so closely identified with the role, they’re indissoluble:  if Stallone wins, it’ll be the Academy giving a lifetime achievement award to Rocky Balboa.  I might feel differently if Rocky was Stallone’s only long-running fighting-man role but he’s played Rambo four times too.  He’s also a more dominant presence in Creed than I expected (and nearly outstays his welcome).  This isn’t any fault of Michael B Jordan’s but the plotting of Donnie’s story is pretty skinny.  The motivation for his becoming a boxer doesn’t amount to more than the fight game being in his blood.  It’s only as he prepares to enter the ring for the world title fight that Donnie explains that he’s driven by wanting to prove he ‘wasn’t a mistake’.

Creed is hardly a political movie yet Stallone’s Academy Award nomination – as the only one the film’s received – has taken on a political significance in 2016.  Several black film-makers and actors will be boycotting the Oscar ceremony because, for the second year running, all twenty acting nominees are white.  In the circumstances, it’s hard to forget either that Ryan Coogler’s only previous feature was a political movie on a racial theme or that, back in 1989, an emphatically racial-political movie was made by one of this year’s leading boycotters, Spike Lee.  Do the Right Thing comprised, like Creed, a mostly black cast.  As with Creed, a white actor, Danny Aiello, was the only member of the cast who was Oscar-nominated, also for Best Supporting Actor.  (To be precise: the only member of the cast nominated for an acting award.  Spike Lee, who had a leading role in Do the Right Thing, was nominated for his screenplay.)  In the event, Aiello lost to an African-American actor, Denzel Washington in Glory.   Washington went on to win Best Actor (for Training Day) in 2002 – the same year in which Sidney Poitier, the only previous black winner of that award (for Lilies of the Field, in 1964), received an honorary Oscar and Halle Berry became the first and, to date, the only black woman to win the Best Actress Oscar (for Monster’s Ball).

I’ve mixed feelings about the controversy clouding this year’s Oscars.  Although the lack of diversity in the acting nominees sounds wrong, I’ve not yet seen a performance by an African-American in a 2015 film that I’ve thought among the best five in any of the four acting categories. (That includes Idris Elba’s work in Beasts of No Nation although not Will Smith’s in Concussion, which hasn’t yet opened in Britain.)   It’s also worth noting that news coverage of the affair has so far tended to emphasise the predominantly white, elderly make-up of the Academy as a whole, without making clear that the acting nominations for Oscars (as distinct from the eventual awards) are decided only by the actor members of the Academy.   Whatever the extent of the problem, it’s depressing and, you’d hope, wrong-headed to suppose that adjusting the ethnic balance of Academy membership is the solution.  The thinking seems to be that this will, in itself, result in a more diverse list of nominations – as if the point of involving more non-white voters is to hope they’ll cast their ballots in a racially prejudiced way.

21 January 2016