CINDERELLA MAN is the sort of movie Hollywood gave up on long ago. It’s a sentimental period piece about working-class folk who speak in dese-dem-dose accents–a mother who takes in sewing, a father who works down by the docks, and three kids who fear being sent away because there’s not enough money to feed all five family members. There’s even a lovable parish priest.
Most striking, Cinderella Man is a hagiographic portrait of a real-life personality who can’t possibly have been as saintly as he is depicted onscreen. The fact that our hero is a boxer, engaged in a punishing sport that involves him beating on other men and getting beaten in return, never becomes the occasion for cheap pop psychologizing. Pugilism is our hero’s job, not his life, and when he’s done with a bout he returns home to the wife and kids. He does nothing–nothing–wrong, and is never less than totally virtuous. He is a wonderful father, a caring husband, and a citizen so upright that he returns to the state of New Jersey the $317 he received in welfare payments during the period when he was out of work.
The filmmaking team responsible for Cinderella Man–director Ron Howard, co-screenwriter Akiva Goldsman, and star Russell Crowe–also made the wonderful Oscar-winning biographical film A Beautiful Mind. They tricked up that true-life tale by filming the paranoid delusions of its schizophrenic protagonist as though they were really happening, only later revealing that much of what we had been watching in the film’s first hour had been nothing more than a psychotic fantasy. That dazzling narrative twist is just what we expect these days from a movie that promises to tell a fairly conventional story about a person’s life. It is as if straightforwardness were now considered synonymous with boredom, or deemed to be the sole province of the dreadfully earnest Lifetime cable channel.
There are two acts of storytelling sleight of hand in Cinderella Man: one in which four years pass as a camera pans across a table top, and another in which the camera passes inside a man’s body to show his rib cage reacting to a punch. Otherwise, there’s no directorial showing-off here, no cinematic hijinks. Cinderella Man is a very square picture, one that, with few emendations, could have been made a half-century ago. It is also a dazzling, emotionally overwhelming and altogether magnificent piece of work–the kind of film that reminds a disillusioned filmgoer why he fell in love with the cinema in the first place. And it features a lead turn by Russell Crowe that is one of the few pitch-perfect performances you will ever see.
The Cinderella Man of the title is James J. Braddock, a promising fighter in the 1920s who fell on hard times at the same time that the country did. We see him first in 1928, a sensible young man with a seemingly limitless future happily married to his childhood sweetheart, Mae (Renée Zellweger). Then, almost instantly, we jump a few years ahead to find Jim and Mae struggling to survive in a basement apartment in a New Jersey tenement. The stock market crash wiped him out, and a series of injuries have consigned him to the bush leagues of boxing. To make a living, he supplements the fighting as a stevedore. After a particularly unsatisfying fight, the local boxing commission pulls Braddock’s license, forcing him into permanent retirement and even more severe penury.
Cinderella Man has all the trimmings of a classic Depression-era picture: crowds of men desperately angling for a day’s work, bills piling up on the hall table, endless lines of shamefaced men at the local relief office, the rows of shanties built by homeless men that came to be known as Hoovervilles, a starving Braddock walking by a Rolls Royce on a ritzy Manhattan street. But either because it’s been so long since such matters have been depicted onscreen, or because director Howard doesn’t hammer you over the head with them, Cinderella Man breathes new life into these once-stale images and scenes.
The movie’s power sneaks up on you precisely because it is so matter-of-fact. When the gas man comes in the dead of winter to cut the heat to the Braddock apartment, Mae pleads with him. She has three kids, she says. The gas man says if he doesn’t cut her off, he’ll get fired, that three other guys on the job got fired when they balked, and he has a family, too. She doesn’t rage or scream or assume she has a right to the gas–because a person in 1933 wouldn’t have made such an assumption. One of the Braddock children wants a second pancake and Mae has to deny it to her; her brothers, who are still sleeping, have to have one as well and there’s not enough batter. The little girl doesn’t complain. When the milkman stops delivering, Mae adds water to what little they have to make it last longer.
The true subject of Cinderella Man is dignity–how Braddock and Mae manage to retain their dignity and self-respect during a time of hardship. The reason Braddock is a great film hero is that he does not allow his difficulties to break him, though they do bend him a bit.
In the most remarkable scene, Braddock goes to the hangout of the New York boxing community to panhandle because he needs to come up with $20 to turn the electricity back on. Crowe achieves something in this scene only a truly great actor would dare. He underdoes it. He makes his pitch quietly, makes no eye contact with any of his old cronies, and keeps his attention firmly on the hat into which rich men are dropping a few coins. He doesn’t play the pathos. Crowe understands that a man like Braddock would have done everything in his power to maintain his composure while forced to act in the most undignified manner possible. He breaks your heart not because he is so pathetic, but because he is so strong–just like the movie that surrounds him.
Cinderella Man takes the same unlikely turn Braddock’s life did when he gets a last-minute chance to return to the ring against a heavyweight contender who needs an easy fight to prepare himself for the championship. Older, out of shape, and full of ill-healed broken bones, Braddock shocks himself and everybody else when he wins the fight and begins the most fabled comeback in the history of boxing.
Hence the movie’s title, a sobriquet given to the real Braddock by Damon Runyon, the Broadway fabulist who was also the most famous sportswriter in America at the time. The idea of a Depression hard case getting a second chance in the profession from which he had been summarily ejected was irresistible newspaper fodder, especially when Braddock eventually found himself facing down the terrifying Max Baer, a ruthless giant who had already killed two men in the ring. Braddock’s return to glory has almost nothing to do with whether he wins or loses the climactic fight (though if you don’t know the outcome, you would do well to avoid finding it out before seeing the movie). “This time I know what I’m fighting for,” he says. And what he means is clear: He fights because it is the only way he can feed his family, keep his children from illness, and his wife from despair. It’s a great story because it’s a noble story, and Cinderella Man is a great movie because it grants James J. Braddock the full measure of his hard-earned, democratic nobility.
John Podhoretz is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.
