It’s all about the men this week in our new releases selection — two variations on toxic masculinity in the world of professional sport and two versions of good men doing their best in difficult circumstances.
Dwayne Johnson is an underestimated serious actor but I’m not sure that going full indie in The Smashing Machine is going to bring him the accolades that he is after. He plays pioneering MMA fighter Mark Kerr who transferred from wrestling — an amateur sport — to UFC and its variants in the late nineties and found himself trapped in a maze of painkilling drug abuse and business exploitation, a story told in a 2002 documentary of the same name.
Johnson undergoes a remarkable transformation — unrecognisable until the character shaves his head in Act III — but I found myself wondering how it was that the prosthetic facial adornments and the makeup covering Johnson’s body tattoos managed to stay on through take after take of heavy duty ring exercise. And if I’m wondering that during the film, I’m not that engaged with the story.
The Smashing Machine treats Mixed Martial Arts and Ultimate Fighting as a legitimate sport which is a position I don’t agree with. I can’t watch it, don’t care about it, and feel like it’s basically a glamourised version of that show where vagrants were encouraged to fight each other for reality television dollars. Having said that, the ring violence is shot by writer and director Benny Safdie (Uncut Gems and others with his brother Josh) with a sensitivity to a mainstream audience. You hear more of the impacts than you see, or he shoots from a comfortable distance.
Emily Blunt plays the thanklessly cliché’d role of the love of Kerr’s life, Dawn Staples, and between her and Johnson they paint a portrait of a young couple who really have no business being together and so it proves. To be honest, if I wanted to see pugilism-adjacent people shouting inarticulately at each other across a kitchen, I’d be watching Raging Bull1.
As the lights went up at the end of the movie, I said to my companion, “What was the point of all of that?” Kerr isn’t a particularly important or influential person, his story isn’t inherently more dramatic than almost anyone else you’d bump into in the street, and while his arc has a nice “learn to be happy in your own skin” resolution to it, I’m not convinced that’s enough.
There’s a saying in sport that you should always “leave everything on the field” meaning if you aren’t crawling off the pitch at the end, you haven’t tried hard enough. Director and co-writer of American Football horror Him, Justin Tipping, has taken that on board and thrown literally everything he has at the screen, to largely bewildering but not uninteresting effect.
Almost everything about the film is heavy-handed, from the name of the franchise at the centre of the story — the San Antonio Saviors — to the term GOAT, from the Greatest Of All Time to ancient Satanic symbol.
Tyriq Withers (I Know What You Did Last Summer) is Cam, a young athlete in the running to inherit the mantle of star quarterback for the Saviors, currently occupied by Isaiah White (Damon Wayans). Unable to take part in the famous league draft due to a head injury, Cam is invited to White’s remote compound for one-on-one training which involves much mental and physical abuse and the kind of stylised chapter heading typography Emerald Fennell favoured in Saltburn.
I was intrigued by the extreme production design of Him, but not much else. Wayans does a nice turn in villainy though. He leaves everything on the pitch.
The Teacher Who Promised the Sea is a Spanish drama that won the audience choice prize in the Catalan film awards, the Gaudís, in 2023. Laia Costa plays Ariadna, a young mother who gets an unexpected call from a team of researchers who have unearthed a Civil War-era mass grave and they believe that there might something to do with her ageing grandfather.
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As Ariadna gets more involved in this story, we go back in time to 1935 and the Catalan village where her grandfather grew up and meet the idealistic young schoolteacher who has taken over the local school. His modern and unorthodox ways quickly win over the children but are frowned upon by the conservative authorities as well as by Franco’s Falangist (Fascist) bully boys.
As we bounce back and forth between the eras, the connections between the two stories emerge and we are reminded that the tragedy of authoritarianism continues to echo through generations, even when no one wants to talk about it.
I felt like the 1935 era material was a bit too shiny — I wanted more grit to the look and feel of it — but the kids perform well and Enric Auquer as Antonio, the teacher, is terrific.
Finally today, a surprise counterpoint to the wave of dismal Saturday night streaming movies we have experienced recently. Paul Greengrass (Bloody Sunday, future F&S recommendation News of the World) is the director of The Lost Bus, an electric disaster movie about the 2018 “Camp” fire, one of California’s deadliest and most destructive.
Matthew McConaughey plays Kevin, back home in small town Paradise after a series of personal disappointments. He’s back home with his mom (played by McConaughey’s actual mom, Kay) and driving a school bus for a living. When a wildfire is literally sparked by power lines, he volunteers to pick up a group of school kids and their teacher (America Ferrara) and drive them out of harm’s way.
The fire moves faster and further than anyone could predict or respond to and the scenes of the professional firefighters and their desperate commanders who are running out of options are as gripping as the FX-heavy scenes of the fire itself.
The Lost Bus (I wish the title was more interesting but that’s almost my only criticism) is a tonic in these troubled times. Ferrara as Mary, the teacher, demonstrates the extraordinary amount of care and professionalism that teachers summon in a crisis and — like The Teacher Who Promised the Sea — we also have another group of gifted child actors who we pour our hopes and fears into.
The script is good, and the points it makes about corporate neglect and malfeasance putting us all at risk are pertinent, but films like this belong to their directors and Greengrass hits it out of the park2.
There’s more to come on Raging Bull in future newsletters so stay tuned.
If you want any more sporting clichés, you know who to call.
