When you hear the words \u201cboxing movie,\u201d your first thought may be of something punchy and upbeat. On second thought, however, it\u2019s startling to consider how much pain is built into the genre, and how downbeat a lot of boxing movies are. \u201cRequiem for a Heavyweight\u201d was an elegy that crawled through the underbelly of the prizefight world. \u201cRocky,\u201d one of the most inspirational movies of its time, still ends with Rocky losing. \u201cRaging Bull\u201d has the tragedy of Shakespeare crossed with the violence of a psychotic Mob saga. \u201cMillion Dollar Baby\u201d was a Christ parable. And last year, the Toronto Film Festival showcased \u201cThe Fire Inside,\u201d a boxing biopic so gritty in its authenticity that the film\u2019s catharsis of victory occurred halfway through, so that it could all go downhill from there.<\/p>\n
And now, at this year\u2019s TIFF, we have \u201cChristy,\u201d a powerfully compelling and unusual boxing biopic that premiered today, starring Sydney Sweeney in a potent, true-note, game-changing knockout of a performance. She plays Christy Martin, who was such a natural dynamo in the ring that starting in the late \u201980s, she wasn\u2019t just instrumental in putting female boxing on the map. She became the face of the sport, arguably the most prominent and successful female boxer in the U.S.<\/p>\n
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She was the first female boxer to be featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated, as well as the first to strike a deal with Don King, and Sweeney plays her with a vicious swagger in the ring that is just this side of gleeful. Her Christy is rather short; next to some of her competitors, with her chopped brown hair and girlish gaze (when she starts boxing she\u2019s 21), she can look sort of like a pugilistic version of Billie Eilish. Yet she wins by knockout nearly every time, and that\u2019s because she\u2019s got a ferocity that\u2019s definitely personal. As she explains in an opening voice-over, she\u2019s smashing her demons.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s fun to see her in the ring, hunched and concentrated, pummeling away, then felling an opponent with a merciless left hook \u2014 but whenever that happens, her ebullience comes out. She grins in triumph and pumps her fists in the air like a kid at her own birthday party; the pleasure she takes in winning is part of what makes her a star. Christy comes from West Virginia and becomes known \u2014 mostly through Don King\u2019s marketing savvy \u00ad\u2014 as \u201cthe coal miner\u2019s daughter,\u201d because she actually is one, and that\u2019s a down-home iconic hook to hang a female smashing machine on.<\/p>\n
But there\u2019s a dark side to this saga, and it rears its head early on, in a most insidious way. When we meet Christy, she\u2019s got a girlfriend, Rosie (Jess Gabor), who she\u2019s sleeping with on the down-low. But everyone around her is onto it, and during an ominously silent Sunday lunch with her Catholic family, her parents (Ethan Embry and Merritt Wever) let her know just how much tolerance they\u2019ll have for this relationship: none. As moviegoers, our expectation is that Christy\u2019s sexual identity is going to cause her problems. It does, but in a far more twisted and extreme way than we expect.<\/p>\n
Her parents are coldly up-front in their homophobia, but this is the late 1980s. It\u2019s not like Christy feels she can be open about who she is to the world. So she takes a surprise turn. Her big break comes when she hooks up with a trainer, Jim Martin (Ben Foster), who sees just how far she could go. Jim is a superb trainer, but he\u2019s a diffident and controlling and weirdly hostile guy. He wears his blond hair in what looks like a televangelist comb-over, and Ben Foster plays him with a puffy, slack-jawed scowl; he\u2019s like Henry Gibson playing the fortysomething Joe Biden. It doesn\u2019t seem that big a deal that Christy\u2019s trainer is a taskmaster and a bit of an a-hole (a lot of movies have been made out of this kind of relationship). But what raises our eyebrows is the night she goes over to his house and sleeps with him. And then she marries him. This strikes us as potentially a messed up thing to do, and the more the film goes on, and the more oppressive Jim turns out to be, the more messed up it becomes.<\/p>\n
Christy, who starts out looking like what one character describes as \u201cbutch,\u201d evolves a new look and aura. The film leaps ahead to 1995, and she\u2019s got a longer mane of curls, and a kewpie-doll vibe, which is now part of her in-the-ring persona. She\u2019s the pixie next door who will wallop your ass. But she\u2019s still not making much money (when we see her and Jim fight about this, it\u2019s an early sign of where the relationship is headed), and it\u2019s only when Don King comes into the picture that her career starts to take off. Chad L. Coleman plays King with a high shriek of a laugh and a spot-on domineering zest; this is a devil you make a deal with but don\u2019t want to cross. Christy, with her \u201cI will pulverize you!\u201d showmanship, gets right on King\u2019s wavelength. When Jim, on the other hand, tells her, \u201cIf you leave me, I\u2019ll kill you,\u201d it\u2019s clear that this is the real devil she has made a deal with. And it was all in some way to \u201cbecome normal.\u201d To deny herself. To create the showbiz charade of being a beast in the ring and a nice American housewife the rest of the time.<\/p>\n
Sydney Sweeney shows you how Christy is acting out a role she needs to make real for herself, and how she gets in deeper and deeper, until she\u2019s drowning. The movie, fashioned with straightforward skill by director David Mich\u00f4d (\u201cThe King\u201d), starts out as \u201cGirlfight\u201d only to turn into the sports-biopic version of \u201cWhat\u2019s Love Got to Do with It.\u201d It\u2019s a wrenching portrait of abuse, enabling, gaslighting, and just how far domestic violence can go. Yet part of the force of it is that Mich\u00f4d has not contorted Christy Martin\u2019s life into some false arc; what was going on beneath her triumph is portrayed with a desperate and idiosyncratic honesty. Boxing movies have a way of feeling mythological, but what\u2019s so effective about \u201cChristy\u201d is that it simply tells her story, allowing the heroism to rise up out of it. Sydney Sweeney is already well on her way to becoming a movie star, but this may go down as the film in which she fully expresses the soul of a movie star, which is this: She completely becomes the character, and in doing so becomes us.<\/p>\n
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