Rocky Rides Seabiscuit
CINDERELLA MAN
Not every star of a movie deserves to be called a movie star. The few who earn that label inspire deep feelings of identification. You don't just watch them act; you root for them, and experience their failures and triumphs as keenly as if they were your own. Russell Crowe is that kind of movie star-a leading man who dares to represent the fears and aspirations of his audience. Audiences feel for Crowe the way they used to feel for Al Pacino in the 70s. Like Pacino, Crowe's persona registers most strongly with young men from working-class to poor backgrounds, but it cuts across class, race and gender lines. Other leading men entertain you; Crowe moves you.
Anyone who doubts this needs to see the Depression-era boxing drama Cinderella Man with a packed house, as I did last Sunday during a paid sneak at the Court Street 12 in downtown Brooklyn. Late in the movie, Crowe's character, poverty-stricken heavyweight fighter Jim Braddock, is invited to enjoy a fancy dinner on the boxing commissioner's tab. Braddock, his wife Mae (Renee Zellweger, doing her kewpie-doll thing), his manager Joe Gould (silver-tongued everyman Paul Giamatti) and Gould's wife Lucille (Linda Kash) have a fine time; the Braddocks eat light and wrap up most of their meal to take home to their starving children. Then Braddock's next opponent, the showboating thug Max Baer (Craig Bierko), saunters into the joint. Braddock's table realizes the evening was just a setup for a photo-op confrontation between Braddock and Baer, a colossus who has already killed two men in the ring. They decide to leave. But Braddock can't make a quiet exit-he's too proud, too intrigued by the prospect of looking death in the eye-so he stands up from the table and walks toward Baer. At the Court Street 12, as Braddock stood up, a young man in the row behind me exclaimed, "That's my boy!" He was talking not to the room, but to himself; he sounded choked up.
The power of Cinderella Man resides almost entirely in Crowe's performance; he ennobles the movie and makes it seem better and more honest than it is. Ron Howard, who collaborated with Crowe on A Beautiful Mind, is a good enough director that I keep wishing he'd be great, and he never is. He rarely makes thematic and narrative points through compositions and cuts, and he's frustratingly inclined to work around, ignore or distort the most potentially disturbing and rewarding aspects of his subject matter. A Beautiful Mind was so determined to make its schizophrenic physicist hero an Oscar-baiting, "uplifting" movie character that it ignored Nash's homosexuality, turned his mental illness into a plot twist and barely bothered to explain his work, instead depicting him as a Rain Man savant.
Likewise, Cinderella Man takes pains to situate Braddock's underdog triumph within the context of Depression-era America, showing Braddock, his wife Mae and their children as emblematic Americans who fell from sustenance at a time when there was no safety net. Braddock was a successful fighter who went broke during the 1929 stock market crash and had to beg for work on the docks, even working left-handed after breaking his right hand in a fight. Cinderella Man doesn't shy away from the main characters' deprivation; we see the Braddocks rationing their food, freezing without heat and contemplating splitting up the family to save money. Howard and cinematographer Salvatore Totino shoot most of the early part of the movie-and all the scenes inside the Braddocks' tenement apartment-in brownish, extra-grainy stock, employing the wobbliest off-center handheld close-ups in an already documentary-styled drama.
At the same time, the movie can't muster the guts to follow through on the implications of its historical context. When Gould hustles Braddock a slot opposite Corn Griffin on an undercard with Baer and defending champion Primo Carnera, the movie encourages us (just as the Depression-era media encouraged fight fans) to view Braddock as an emblem of the common man's aspirations-as a decent fellow who suffered a run of bad luck, then seized an opportunity. It's easy to see why Howard and screenwriters Akiva Goldsman and Cliff Hollingsworth had trouble resisting this notion; it plays to Crowe's movie-star strengths, and to American cinema's longstanding cult of the underdog. But they still should have resisted it, or at least complicated or subverted it, because it's dishonest-an example of how, in American movies, ideology naturally reproduces itself.
We're encouraged to root against Griffin-and against subsequent Braddock opponent John Henry Lewis, and then Baer-because Braddock is our man, and he represents the underdog. (On the night of the Braddock-Baer fight, the Braddocks' church is packed with anxious Braddock fans listening to the bout on the radio, and the priest tells Mae, "They think he's fighting for them.") Yet socially and economically speaking, Griffin, Lewis and Baer were underdogs, too-arguably less lovable than the rakish, tough Braddock, but victims of an inequitable business (and an inequitable country) just like him. Even the movie's designated villain, Baer, was a butcher's son who developed his muscles by delivering slabs of meat.
Braddock repeatedly refers to himself suffering "a bad run of luck" and then having some good luck, tacitly endorsing the idea that life is what it is, and that we should just accept it and not complain, because eventually things will go our way. Howard and his screenwriters are so wedded to the myth of Braddock-as-symbol-of-upward-mobility that they muff one of the film's most politically loaded subplots: the sad fate of Braddock's fellow dockworker, Mike Wilson (Paddy Considine), a left-wing firebrand and would-be union organizer. Braddock sees himself in Wilson only in the sense that Wilson is a workingman with a hot temper for whom things ended badly; Braddock sees himself as fighting (vaguely) for Mike and for people like Mike. But against what? A 1930s capitalist system that keeps most of workers' earnings, refuses to provide any kind of safety net, wears them out and then discards them like livestock? Or a sport in which, pre-Don King, owners and executives lived like pashas while poor men beat each other's brains out and died penniless?
I'm not asking Howard to become Ken Loach, but really. Cinderella Man is plainly ready to acknowledge such troublesome inequities-inequities placed in the narrative's foreground, and boldfaced-that when Howard avoids them, the movie seems inept, sometimes cheerfully sinister. Crowe's emotionally honest performance is fused to a lie masquerading as inspirational real-life myth. We cheer Braddock's pluck, as well we should; but shouldn't we also be made aware of the social desperation and resentment that helped fuel Braddock's fame, and the manipulations that conspired to keep him struggling even when he was winning big fights?
Even in Braddock's finest hour, the rulers of boxing treat Braddock like a show horse. They can't believe he's not worn out, and when they learn otherwise, they're happy to saddle him up for one more ride, and the movie presents their cold manipulations neutrally, as an elemental fact of life that shouldn't outrage us, or even bug us a little. After the movie, a viewer put Cinderella Man's failures in context, perhaps without meaning to: "It's inspirational," he said excitedly. "It's the Seabiscuit of people."
Our hero and surrogate is Father Henri Kremer (Ulrich Matthes, who played Josef Goebbels in the recent Downfall), a Jesuit sent to a concentration camp for criticizing Hitler's bigoted social policies. When he interferes in a Nazi officer's beating of a Polish priest, the camp's officers respond by hanging the Pole from a huge crucifix in the yard-a show of force that doubles as a blasphemous insult against the camp's 2700 imprisoned clergymen.
Kremer expects to suffer the same fate, but to his surprise, he's released from Dachau and returned to native Luxembourg on a nine-day furlough. His contact, a baby-faced commandant named Gebhardt (August Diehl), gives him a mission: he must use his persuasive power to convince the city's bishop (Hilmar Thate), a Nazi resister, to sign a document formally allying himself Luxembourg's Catholics with their oppressors. Gebhardt at first thinks Kremer will come around and approach the bishop of his own volition. When it becomes clear that Kremer won't jump without being pushed, Gebhardt adds new layers of menace. Kremer has family in Luxembourg; plus, if Kremer returns to Dachau without doing the Reich's bidding, he could receive even harsher treatment, and his fellow clergy might be tortured or killed as punishment for Kremer's obstinance. The priest could forestall all these threats by obtaining the bishop's signature. But that would mean weakening the unofficial but powerful alliance between Luxembourg's government, which never fully accepted German rule, and the Catholic Church, which comforted Luxembourg in its resistance. (That the Church did the right thing where Luxembourg is concerned will be scant comfort to those whose pleas for help were ignored-but that's a whole other movie.) For Kremer, the right decision is a utilitarian one: the greatest good for the greatest number of people. But it's not easy to make such a decision when you, your family and dozens of others will suffer.
(Mixed to negative reviews of Schlondorff's film have sounded some odd notes: that compared to the Holocaust itself, the tale of a conscience-stricken Jesuit is irrelevant, and that once you've figured out the morally correct ending to this story, it ceases to be absorbing. If you are incapable of seeing momentous events reflected in smaller ones, and if you go to movies to guess how the plot will turn out, both criticisms are impossible to argue with. I guess A Man for All Seasons was boring, too, if you knew how things were going to turn out for Sir Thomas More.)
The Ninth Day refuses to let audiences to feel superior to Kremer's situation and pretend they would have instinctively done the right thing, consequences be damned. Schlondorff doesn't present Kremer as the arbritrary, one-dimensional protagonist of an abstract moral puzzle. He and Matthes define Kremer not as a symbol of certain religious, political or philosophical beliefs, but as an imperfect man who just happens to be a priest-a distinction that defines the movie's finer qualities. Eberhard Gorner and Andreas Pfluger's screenplay unfolds in a foursquare, semi-classical style reminiscent of social dramas from the 1960s-particularly Sidney Lumet's Holocaust-themed character study The Pawnbroker, which, like The Ninth Day, is structured around a series of traumatic flashbacks.
But it would be a mistake to write off The Ninth Day as an old-fashioned message picture or as a political or religious picture (though both subjects are central). It's a psychological drama that just happens to be set in the past; its hero's actions have moral, psychological and emotional weight. (Schlondorff and cinematographer Tomas Erhart even try to suggest pain and terror by selectively quadruple-printing certain shots, giving the aftermath of violence a foggy, disjointed feeling. It's a striking style choice that won't appeal to everybody; a similar technique was employed in Middle Passage, a French-produced slavery drama that aired on HBO a couple of years ago.) The Dachau flashbacks show not just Kremer's heroically stubborn righteousness, but his all-too-human moments of selfishness, the worst of which might have caused the suicide of a fellow inmate. Kremer's utilitarian quandary in Luxembourg seems a gigantic echo of situations that occurred in Dachau. Does he have the strength to give up short-term (private) comfort for long term (public) gain?
By juxtaposing the Luxembourg sequences with Kremer's flashbacks to Dachau, The Ninth Day implies that most moral choices differ not in kind, but in the magnitude of their consequences. The movie also suggests that religious precepts-when observed diligently and without hypocrisy-have social value beyond the question of whether God exists. The imprisoned Jesuits are men of conscience who strive, however imperfectly, to exemplify Christ's teachings, and their goodness inspires good men and shames bad ones (even Gebhardt, a Nazi who was one a priest-in-training). Kremer's willingess to suffer (and to permit his family and fellow preists to suffer) for a greater good is implicitly compared to Jesus' willingness to embrace his own death-and God's willingness to let Jesus die-for a higher purpose.
Schlondorff's roundabout God-talk doesn't end there; The Ninth Day is filled with secular re-interpretations of religious concepts, from Ebhardt and Kremer's debate over the meaning of the word Judas, to a climactic scene that devises a workaday, real-world equivalent to the miracle of the loaves and fishes. This is all thoughtful, provocative stuff. Unfortunately, the director presents it so subtly that if you're not looking for it-or if you're temperamentally disinclined to notice it-you'll miss it, and write off The Ninth Day as just another drama about moral choice, as if such films were as common as flower buds in spring.