Ron Howard is an exemplar of honorable mediocrity. His films are conventional and stuffed with cliches, but their nice-guy liberalism is more sincere and nuanced than their tropes would lead one to expect. In his better efforts—Night Shift, Far and Away, Parenthood, The Paper, and now Cinderella Man—the sense of conviction is so passionate that the truth behind the cliches periodically emerges.
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This is Howard’s first feature since the award-winning A Beautiful Mind, and the storytelling is fluid and gripping. He has plenty of cliches to peddle about boxing and working-class virtues in the midst of deprivation during the Depression, and the visual rhetoric in which he couches those cliches even give them a metaphysical dimension. The decor is as underlit as it is in Million Dollar Baby, and the cinematography’s even more mannerist in fetishizing darkness to project an aura of doom and desperation. In the deftly staged prizefight sequences, Howard goes even further than Clint Eastwood did in rendering subjective impressions in expressionistic terms. But the vivid urgency with which Howard conjures up the period suggests that he wants his film to be something more than mood spinning—he wants it to be a pointed class statement addressed to the present, much as Titanic was.
Emotionally, this is more a movie about what it means to have your electricity shut off than about what it means to become the heavyweight champion of the world—a title Braddock held for only two years, until he was knocked out by Joe Louis. The details that linger here are of Braddock’s wife (Renee Zellweger) and kids stripping wood from a billboard support for heat and of Braddock passing his hat in a bar among former boxing cronies to get $18 to keep his family together. The boxing story itself matters mainly as an expression of class solidarity: Braddock’s job as a Hoboken dockworker, which strengthened his left hand and helped him make a comeback in 1934, counts for as much as his performance in the ring. The film also does a fine job of conveying the quintessential 30s experience of following a fight on the radio—as Braddock’s family is seen doing at the film’s climax—suggesting that imagination and identification played as much a role in his appeal as spectacle.
Directed by Ron Howard
Written by Cliff Hollingsworth and Akiva Goldman
With Russell Crowe, Renee Zellweger, Paul Giamatti, Craig Bierko, Paddy Considine, Bruce McGill, and Ron Canada
