{"id":48258,"date":"2025-10-01T03:46:07","date_gmt":"2025-10-01T03:46:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/48258\/"},"modified":"2025-10-01T03:46:07","modified_gmt":"2025-10-01T03:46:07","slug":"the-smashing-machine-pulls-its-punches","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/48258\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cThe Smashing Machine\u201d Pulls Its Punches"},"content":{"rendered":"

Only two kinds of actors are bad: those who can\u2019t be themselves and those who you wish wouldn\u2019t be. All the rest are likely to shine in movies by good directors, and most actors whose reputations aren\u2019t illustriously artistic have mainly been unfortunate in their collaborations. Dwayne (The Rock) Johnson has long been in my private pantheon of actors who are awaiting their showcase, ever since his performance in Michael Bay\u2019s \u201cPain & Gain<\/a>,\u201d from 2013. Since then, Johnson has piled hit atop hit without stretching his artistry; now, in the title role of \u201cThe Smashing Machine,\u201d Benny Safdie\u2019s bio-pic about the former mixed-martial-arts star Mark Kerr, Johnson does the substantial work of bringing a noteworthy character to life, by infusing the role with his own expansive personality\u2014perhaps unsurprisingly, given his background as a professional wrestler. It\u2019s a performance of flair and precision and imparts emotion to a script that lacks it.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Smashing Machine,\u201d which Safdie both wrote and directed, portrays Mark (the character, as distinguished from the real-life Kerr) from the time of his first bout in the Ultimate Fighting Championship, in 1997, to 2000. The period begins with victories and growing fame\u2014though his achievements are shadowed and threatened by substance-abuse issues and conflict with his girlfriend, Dawn Staples (Emily Blunt)\u2014and peters out with his climactic defeat in a big-money tournament that owes its high financial stakes to his earlier success. Safdie\u2019s approach to the story is divided against itself: as a writer, he takes an analytical view, creating scenes that clearly exemplify the fighter\u2019s powers and troubles and the personality traits that contribute to both; but he films the story with loose documentary-like sequences and large-scale spectacle, neither of which matches the script\u2019s expressive precision.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s where Johnson\u2019s acting comes in. Paradoxically, his performance draws strength from the narrow focus of Safdie\u2019s writing, which enables him to flesh out the specific trait, feeling, or impulse that each scene exemplifies, slotting them together like tiles in a mosaic to form Mark\u2019s character. The most fascinating of these traits is shown early on, when a journalist interviews Mark after his first triumph. As Mark describes his strategies, his reflections quickly outleap the specifics of the sport and take on a philosophical dimension. He starts with the simple part: his need to \u201creally assert\u201d himself on his opponent. Then he frames victory in psychological terms, saying, \u201cI\u2019m going to physically impose my will onto\u201d the person in the ring who has the temerity to fight him: \u201cYou really feel when that happens, when the person just lets go and totally withers away in your arms.\u201d He describes inflicting pain in gory detail, and, as if hearing the implications of his own thoughts, says that everything \u201cfelt very evolutionary,\u201d a sublimely sidelong word for actions and emotions that he recognizes as atavistic and feral.<\/p>\n

Safdie\u2019s presentation of these comments foregrounds Mark\u2019s understanding of what\u2019s profound, and profoundly disturbing, about mixed martial arts, and perhaps all martial arts\u2014the channelling and professionalizing of brutality. The scene sets the tone for the entire film, but it\u2019s a height that Safdie can\u2019t sustain. He delivers a rational movie on an irrational subject, an externalized film on a story of subjective depths. Safdie is obviously fascinated by the fighter\u2019s psychology, but he doesn\u2019t successfully dramatize the extremity of Mark\u2019s experiences\u2014except in negative form, by way of his difficulty fitting into the norms of a noncombatant life style.<\/p>\n

Mark lives with Dawn in bland comfort in suburban Phoenix, but there\u2019s nothing bland about the way he makes his living, and the conditions that this imposes on his daily routine place enormous stress on the couple\u2019s relationship; Dawn thinks of Mark\u2019s athletic career as a job, whereas, for him, it\u2019s a comprehensive way of life. He declares, before another match, that, to succeed, he has to remain \u201cone-hundred-per-cent concentrated\u201d or else his \u201cemotions will be running around everywhere,\u201d and some of the movie\u2019s most striking moments\u2014and some of Johnson\u2019s most impressive acting\u2014involve Mark\u2019s ironclad concentration when events are spinning out of control. His domestic life entails set regimens, including precise dietary requirements, and when Dawn gets the ingredients of his morning shake wrong (skim milk instead of whole, half a banana instead of one and a half bananas), he doesn\u2019t rant or even criticize, but coolly dumps it out and makes himself another. His eerie calm seems to irritate Dawn even more than a candidly emotional confrontation would have done.<\/p>\n

Dawn (a grievously underwritten character whom Blunt conjures with sheer actorly energy) is devoted and sympathetic but out of touch with the absolute, quasi-monastic nature of Mark\u2019s athletic calling. (The script never makes clear whether their relationship had been different prior to his fighting d\u00e9but.) She joins him at the gym and helps him stretch, but her inability to pierce the solitude at the core of his pursuit drives her to a reckless decision that proves consequential. It leads to the movie\u2019s best dramatic scene, one that plays to Safdie\u2019s rational strengths. When Mark is in Japan to make his d\u00e9but on a mixed-martial-arts circuit called Pride, Dawn flies over and surprises him there, showing up in his locker room at exactly the wrong moment, just as he\u2019s preparing to enter the ring for a bout. He barely acknowledges her presence, putting himself into a tightly controlled state of pressurized ferocity so intensely focussed and isolated, detached from all other concerns and thoughts, that she asks him if he\u2019s high. (In pressing him for attention, she merely breaks his trance and, as the movie makes clear, is partly to blame for his bad results.) Johnson\u2019s performance here is transcendent in its simplicity; doing as little as possible by means of will power, displaying an intense remoteness and an active impassivity, he strikingly evokes an athlete\u2019s competitive self-sublimation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Only two kinds of actors are bad: those who can\u2019t be themselves and those who you wish wouldn\u2019t…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":48259,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[37580,458,146,85,46,37579,37578],"class_list":["post-48258","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-biopics","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-mixed-martial-arts","tag-movie-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48258","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48258"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48258\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/48259"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48258"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48258"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48258"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}