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Ron Howard is one of our best American directors. This might be for some, as it usually is for me, little but faint praise.
There is a dichotomy in the term, "American director," which to me really means, "Hollywood mainstream director."
Howard is a product of "the system," which is to say that he can make a competent movie, but rarely a magical movie.
I admire his movies, I enjoy his movies, but there is little in them to make me love them. The stories are well told,
the actors go through their paces, and the direction and the cinematography are both more than capably done.
There is, however, a secret ingredient missing in Howard's movies that makes the characters in a story come to life and
live and breathe for those of us in the audience. I have to admit that I never felt that I was watching anyone other than
the actors in this movie act in this movie. Crowe and Zellweger never came to life for me as Jim and Mae Braddock.
Paul Giamatti came about as close to life as any with his passionate portrayal of Joe Gould, Braddock's once and again
boxing manager. And all of Braddock's boxing opponents came to life for me, but not the stars of this story. Maybe that is
the problem, or one of the problems, which is that we are always conscious that we are watching the stars play their roles
instead of forgetting who the stars are because we have been captured by the roles that they are playing.
This is the difference between this movie and last year's "Million Dollar Baby," a far better movie. Ron Howard
is a good director, but Clint Eastwood is a masterful director. The characters in his movies are so well written and so well
acted that they become real people and we forget for a moment that they are only actors there who are playing these roles.
Part of the problem is with the screenplay by author Cliff Hollingsworth. As uplifting as it is, it is still flawed because
there is nothing extraneous in the movie that allows these people to come to life. Real life is composed of bits and pieces
and "Cinderella Man" has precious few of these.
Everything in "Cinderella Man" is linear and life is not linear. Everything in this movie points towards an
end, and life is rarely that direct. The lines that every character speaks are spoken with an end in mind and life is rarely
that uncomplicated. Such minimalism in the character development leaves all of them as one dimensional cardboard characterizations
detracted by a paucity of humanity.
None of the characters speak anything other than what is strictly necessary to reach the inevitable goal that this story
strives mightily, if unimaginatively, to achieve. I might have thought that a movie as long as this with its two hours and
24 minutes of running time has enough of that luxury to throw some unnecessary verbiage into the stew, but little or nothing
is added here.
Sadly, the movie as a movie and a story about a remarkable and inspiring life is irretrievable damaged as a result. Jim
Braddock is a boxer and only a boxer. Mae Braddock is an adoring and supportive wife and mother and only that. Jim and Mae
and their friends all attend mass and are people good and true through and through. Jim's best friend, Mike Wilson (Paddy
Considine) shows some flaws late in the film, and Jimmy Johnston (Bruce McGill) shows considerable color as a sleazy rich
man above the frayed edges of the Depression.
Otherwise, the good people are all good and the bad people are all bad and the opponents in the ring are the dark villains
of the story as if none of them had wives and kids who love them. But darkest of all is The Great Depression, which is cast
as the true villain of this story.
"When the country was on its knees, he brought America to its feet!" Since we know the story from the tag line
of the movie posters, there is no suspense and nothing left in the movie to fascinate us. "Cinderella Man," is a
true fable named after a real fable penned by Damon Runyan, another fable.
Ron Howard is a professional and he knows his business. Although he is most often pictured as "Opie," the child
star from his "Mayberry R.F.D." days, this role actually took place after almost two dozen other roles for this
one time famous child actor. He even reprised his later "Happy Days" role as Richie Cunningham on a "Laverne
and Shirley" episode costarring Penny Marshall, another child star, product of the Hollywood system and now one of Howard's
business partners.
Over the years he has gathered around him a competent team of fellow producers, including Brian Grazer, Todd Hallowell,
and the aforementioned Penny Marshall. After their earlier successful outings, including the production of 2001's Oscar winning,
"A Beautiful Mind," they now offer us "Cinderella Man" with Russell Crowe again as the star in this story
about the Depression era boxing legend James Braddock.
Jim Braddock was an Irish immigrant who chose a career in boxing to that of being a longshoreman. By 1929 he had achieved
a comfortable middle class living with a nice home in the suburbs and his ownership of a taxi company along with a portfolio
of stocks and bonds. Unfortunately, everything that he owned "went south" after 1929.
Further compounding his problems was the fact that Braddock was so hard up for money that he fought his last fight with
a broken right hand and had to depend on clutching his opponent throughout the fight. Needless to say, the fans were not impressed
and he was booed from the ring. The Madison Square Garden impresario, Jimmy Johnston (Bruce McGill, in another well acted,
sleazy performance), banned him from the ring for this performance in spite of a heartfelt plea for understanding.
The Great Depression quickly reduced him to hard scrabble living in a flophouse tenement along with his supportive wife,
Mae (Renée Zellweger), and their three young children. There was little money left and the times were so precarious that they
often went hungry along with having the electricity turned off for lack of payment.
"The Great Depression" is as much a character in this film as any other and Howard does not stint from showing
us the horrors of life to which millions of people were reduced. The Braddock family "home" is a dark pit of an
apartment in the basement of a flophouse and New York's Central Park was turned into a "Hooverville" filled with
thousands of people who had lost their homes and had nowhere else to go.
And that is why I have made the rather unlikely decision to add "The Great Depression" as a character in this
film, for it colors everything else in this movie with its strength and power.
If only the rest of the story were that powerful. Sadly, this movie does far too little to fascinate us with down and
out boxer Jim Braddock's truly remarkable and inspiring achievements.
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