“Professional boxing is the only major American sport whose primary, and often murderous, energies are not coyly deflected by such artifacts as balls and pucks,” Joyce Carol Oates once wrote. What she meant is that the violence in boxing is unadorned, stripped bare and unburdened by the complicated relationship other sports have with decorum. There are rules in boxing, of course, but what is allowed is what is restricted in other sports, a photonegative of the respectability that is attached to those games, at least in theory. What this has come to mean, especially for people who have never stepped in a ring, is that boxing is a purely physical sport — all brawn and no brain, a battle of inflicting and withstanding violence against the body.In Antoine Fuqua’s film “Southpaw,” Billy Hope (Jake Gyllenhaal) takes this idea to its logical conclusion. His approach to boxing, which is successful for a short amount of time, is to take punches and outlast his opponent, all offense and no defense. Hope’s capacity for pain stems from his days in the group home, where he met his wife, Maureen (Rachel McAdams), and most of his friends, whom he has kept close during his meteoric rise. Following a grueling victory in the ring at the beginning of the film, Hope stumbles around his mansion, bruised and bloody from the night before, and gives his posse expensive watches as gifts, just for sticking by his side.Maureen wants her husband to take a break from the ring. They have a young daughter (Oona Laurence) they need to consider, and money isn’t an issue. But after Billy reluctantly agrees, tragedy strikes his family and he spins out of control. He steps into the ring and allows himself to lose, a sacrificial lamb. After another nasty accident — the product of long, pronounced grief — Hope loses his daughter and his home. Most of his friends scatter and his manager drops him in favor of his rival, who is responsible for his tragedy.Stranded at the bottom, Hope finds — you guessed it — hope in the form of Titus “Tick” Wills (Forest Whitaker), a former professional boxing trainer who is now running a dusty gym populated by underprivileged kids. Initially going to the gym asking for a job — Tick lets him sweep the floors after hours — Hope eventually convinces his new mentor to help him train for a fight against his old nemesis, a championship bout that is billed in the press as a revenge match. Tick is reluctant at first, as his style of training is the antithesis of what Hope did in the ring. But with nothing left to lose, Hope agrees to relearn how to fight an opponent, following Tick through a regiment that teaches thinking over physicality.Much of “Southpaw” is standard sports-movie rise-fall-rise cliché, the underdog at the bottom of the mountain struggling on his way up to the top. The fights are loud and intense, a swirl of flashing lights and a heavy, pounding sound design. It’s clear from the beginning that the film has no qualms presenting boxing as the money-making machine it has become. Combining shots that look like a pay-per-view broadcast with “Raging Bull” style visceral point-of-view compositions, the movie oscillates between the two men in the ring and the capital that is changing hands on the outside.If anything is wrong with “Southpaw” it derives from Kurt Sutter’s script, which relies too heavily on masculine tropes and corny lines of dialogue (not to mention the main character’s name, which actually elicited laughter in the audience when I saw the film). There is not much for Gyllenhaal to do but stalk around in his newly transformed buff body and mumble banalities in a fake outer-borough accent. Whitaker does a lot with the little he is given, but it would have been nice for him to play something other than the “old wise black man” role.By following the rigid lines of the sports movie, which determines that the main character must come out the other side vindicated, “Southpaw” loses its focus. Billy Hope might be redeemed as the credits role, but what lingers is the one problem that he refuses to face: every punch he takes might be his last. There are only so many comeback stories before it’s too late. “Southpaw” opens Friday, July 24.
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