"When our country was on its knees, he
brought America to his feet."
So
proclaims the tagline for Ron Howard's Depression Era boxing film
Cinderella Man starring Russell Crowe. Cinderella Man, the story of
1930's heavyweight champion James J. Braddock, has been compared to the
2003 film Seabiscuit, both stories of plucky sports underdogs that
triumphed during the Great Depression. The comparison is apt, and not
just because Crowe mopes around Cinderella Man with the same blank,
hangdog expression as that darn horse. Like the insipid Seabiscuit, this
entire big budget biopic comes off as yet another Hollywood effort to
sweeten the story of the 1930s. And like Seabiscuit, Cinderella Man
portrays the Depression as a time, in the words of film reviewer Jamie
Bernard, "that was really good for teaching values." Beyond that, all
one would learn from Cinderella Man is that the Great Depression was
really depressing.
In reality, the 1930s was an era of
not only poverty but also mass resistance, as strikes swept the south
and shut down the cities of San Francisco, Toledo, and Minneapolis. It
was a time when many of the reforms on the chopping block today, like
Social Security, were won through the struggles of the labor movement.
It was a time when revolution in the United States was on the table as
hundreds of thousands of people attempted to offer an alternative to the
barbarisms of capitalism.
As Depression era sports writer Lester Rodney
put it, "In the 1930s if you weren't some kind of radical, Communist,
socialist, or Trotskyist, you were considered brain-dead, and you
probably were!" Just about everyone in Cinderella Man wears their
brain-deadness like a medal of honor, passively enduring poverty as if
they had just received red, white, and blue lobotomies.
The only hint of the other side of the
Depression in Cinderella Man is Braddock's dockworker buddy Mike
Wilson. Mike believes in the power of protest, but he's also clearly
doomed from the opening frame, portrayed as a drunk whose wife snaps at
him, "You can save the world, but not your family!" Braddock's spouse Mae
mirrors Mike's wife, as the typically sexist sports-movie female
character, fretting with every fight and forced to say lines like, "You
are the champion of my heart, James J. Braddock!"
The film is also shamefully simplistic
and even slanderous in its portrayal of the heavyweight champion at the
time Max Baer. Baer was a hulking, brutal fighter, who had two opponents
die in the ring. But Cinderella Man reduces Baer to a one-dimensional
stock villain, a perfect counterpart for Crowe's paper-thin stock hero.
As played by Craig Bierko, Baer struts around with a psychotic gleam in
his eye, as if he would enjoy nothing more than killing Braddock and
spitting on his grave. In one scene, he looks at Mae and says, "Nice!
Too bad she'll be a widow."
In reality, Baer was devastated and
nearly destroyed by the ring deaths that occurred at his hands, as any
non-sociopath would be. Also Baer was a complex figure who fought
against Nazi favorite Max Schmeling with a Star of David embroidered on
his trunks. To see Howard's movie, one would think that the only symbol
Baer favored was a pentagram.
But the real tragedy of the film is
its treatment of Braddock. Crowe does what he can with a terrible
script, but it says everything about the film that the final credits
roll before the actual ending of Braddock's fight career, a 1937 8th
round knockout at the hands of Joe Louis. Louis, the first
African-American heavyweight champ since Jack Johnson, was a symbol of
hope for both African-Americans and the left wing of the radicalizing
working class. To have portrayed his fight with Braddock would have
meant dealing with complex issues of how boxing, in a violent society,
has acted as a deeply symbolic morality play about the ability of people
- especially people of color - to succeed and stand triumphant. It would
have meant trying to understand why some people would have rooted for
Braddock against Baer, but then bitterly opposed him against Louis. But
the filmmakers could care less about these complicated dimensions of
either the period or the sport. Their job in Cinderella Man is to take
complex characters and turn them into stick figures, easily consumed and
easily forgotten. At that task, they have succeeded admirably.
Leadership Focus