Movie Review: Southpaw

There are a lot of reasons that I go to the movies. I like watching movies with other people in dark, cool theaters. I like the big screen. Sno-caps, perhaps? All sorts of great stuff. I also am a deep believer in film as an artistic medium. Some of the most profound interactions with art that I have had in my life have come in movie theaters. I saw Prisoners four times in the theater for precisely this reason. I find movies, well, moving. I laugh. I cry. Often I feel closer to characters on the screen than I do to people that I know in real life. Sometimes, I even go to the movies knowing that I will see people in pain. I saw The Passion of the Christ when it came out. I twice saw 12 Years a Slave. Both films are unflinching in their brutality, and both films offered me something outside of the brutality. Southpaw, the new film from Antoine Fuqua, director of Training Day, is a brutal film, I'm just not sure it offered much else.


Southpaw is the story of Billy "The Great" Hope. Played by Jake Gyllenhaal (in a performance that you know will be nominated for Best Actor at this year's academy awards, even if you don't know that this is a Weinstein Company passion project), it is almost impossible not to plug the word "white" between his nom de guerre and last name. I imagine the filmmakers know this, it seems too obvious for experienced players like Fuqua and Kurt Sutter (of Sons of Anarchy fame) not to be playing with deliberately. But the film does so little with the racial dimension of boxing (perhaps the most racialized sport in America) that it feels totally out of place. It is not unlike the effect that would be created if in The Forty Year Old Virgin instead of having a house full of action figures, Steve Carrell's house had been full of Nazi memorabilia, you'd spend the whole movie wondering what exactly was going on. In fact, during the movies best scene, between Gyllenhaal and Forest Whitaker (in his best performance since he played Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland), a scene where two of the finest actors of their respective generations are doing astonishingly deep and powerful work, all I could think to myself was "I wish this scene was between two black men instead."

As Tick Wills, a former fighter turned trainer, Whitaker is at his best. His career has included some strange choices, in terms of quality. But if he needs to be in movies like the laughable Taken 3 to bankroll his ability to give performances like this one, more power to the man. Even more than Gyllenhaal's, this is worth of Academy recognition. I'd have been far more interested in a full length feature film dedicated to this character's story.

Despite all the positive things I have to say about the performances, the first act of this movie is so raw and punishing that the inevitable redemption arc that comes about by the third act simply can't compete with the battering you take early. At a certain point you feel punch drunk.Twice I thought to myself "I could just go home, no one is making me stay here." It's that kind of movie. The irony here is, that's the same desire expressed by nearly every character in the movie. They want to leave this world behind as badly as you do. That's something, I guess. I'm just not sure it's enough.

Rating: 2.5/4