Benny Safdie’s The Smashing Machine—premiering here at the Venice Film Festival—is satisfying as much for what it doesn’t do as for what it does. Safdie, who also wrote the script, tells the story of how real-life mixed-martial artist, UFC champion, and all-around bruiser Mark Kerr won worldwide fame, tumbled down a rabbit hole of opioid addiction, and clawed his way back to sanity and success. And that’s about it: Safdie doesn’t tie the story into excessively dramatic pretzel knots, and he doesn’t try to apply any Rocky-style narrative formulas, as effective as those formulas can be. Instead, he simply trusts his star, Dwayne Johnson, to lead us through Kerr’s story of escalating fame, addiction, and recovery, without resorting to the clichés of so many addiction-recovery dramas. Kerr kicks his habit early in the film—there’s no real spiraling decline, no horrific bottoming out. So what we see through most of the movie is a champion who’s fallen and gotten back up again, asking, Now what? It’s the persistent drive of the “Now what?” that makes the movie work.
The movie opens circa 1997, with Johnson’s Kerr at the top of his game. We hear an announcer running through the play-by-play as we see Kerr squeezing and pummeling the bejesus out of an opponent. “Wow! A magnificent knee to the face, and another knee to the face!” For the uninitiated—before I saw The Smashing Machine, that would be me—the “knee to the face” move was at one time a popular feature of mixed-martial arts, though it has since been essentially banned in the UFC. If you don’t care for fighting as a spectator sport, it’s excruciating to watch. It looks like it really, really hurts, and also like it could kill you. (No wonder Senator John McCain tried to get the MMA banned in 1996, having seen a UFC match and deeming it “human cockfighting.”) But another feature of MMA, at least as it’s depicted in The Smashing Machine, is that guys who engage in this punishing sport are likely to bounce back up even after defeat, treating their opponent as a pal rather than a sworn enemy. Even as they strive to inflict maximum pain on one another, they have a lot invested in treating the whole thing as just good fun—though the desire to win dwarfs everything else, and that’s certainly true of Kerr.
Kerr has a girlfriend, Dawn, played beautifully by Emily Blunt. She’s supportive and dutiful, but living with a driven athlete—particularly one who happens to also be an addict—is largely a pain in the ass. Kerr berates her after she mixes up a power-smoothie for him, using the ingredients he preferred yesterday instead of the new combination of bananas, whole milk, and protein powder he’s dreamed up without telling her. She rolls her eyes, but we can see how his irritability, his persnicketiness, is wearing her down.
On the flip side, she sometimes babies him in a way he finds emasculating. This is a couple in search of a happy medium and failing to find it, possibly because there’s no such thing. When Kerr loses a match, breaking a long, impressive winning streak, he finally realizes the opioids he’s been stockpiling and abusing are doing him more harm than good. He goes into rehab and emerges with the determination to stay clean—and that, too, annoys Dawn, who sees his newfound resolve as sanctimonious. These characters don’t always behave as we want them to; they feel lived-in, not written, with flaws and attributes that chime with things we see in our family, our friends, ourselves. At one point Kerr, in Japan for a match, steps into a store filled with delicate, beautiful things. He chooses a luminous ceramic bowl as a gift for Dawn, then impulsively adds a silk scarf, plucking it from a table and handing it to the saleswoman. “This too,” he says. “My girlfriend loves colors.” I mean, who doesn’t love colors? But there’s something touching about the way this hulking hunk of a man allows himself to lean into tenderness.
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Kerr and Dawn have some volcanic fights, but there’s nearly as much drama involving Kerr’s closest friend, Mark Coleman (MMA fighter Ryan Bader), another champion who, as he begins to age out of the sport, becomes Kerr’s trainer. There’s friction between Dawn and Coleman—they both want the best for Kerr, but see different routes to whatever “best” is. Then an unlikely turn of events drives a wedge between Coleman and Kerr, too. Bader gives a sharp, subtle performance, underplaying in scenes where even an experienced actor might chomp down. His performance reminds you that these athletes are just guys—teeming with testosterone, sure, but the good ones are attuned to the value of loyalty even within their competitiveness.
Safdie and cinematographer Maceo Bishop have given the film a vaguely grungy look, as if the images had been buffed lightly with sandpaper—after all, this is a rough, dirty sport, not a gentlemanly one, so it deserves a ’70s Times Square look. Safdie has made some clever, thoughtful choices with the music, too: a highlight is Billy Swann’s loping, hypnotic version of “Don’t Be Cruel.” And he gives Johnson lots of room to blossom in the role of Kerr. Johnson’s body has an unreal quality: it’s like a ziggurat of rounded muscle perched atop two shapely, sinewy legs. Predictably, there’s lots of fighting in The Smashing Machine, including plenty of that knee-to-the-face business, though the sound design is often more disturbing than the visuals; the sound of flesh giving way as it’s being pounded like a piece of meat just feels inhumane. Why would anyone want to inflict this, or feel it? As Kerr, Johnson helps us understand that drive. When he’s not in the ring, his eyes have a soft, searching quality, like those of a dreamy sailor wondering where the wind will take him next. His Kerr is a lover, a fighter, an athlete, a winner and a loser, all mixed up in one human being. The ending of The Smashing Machine suggests that somehow, the real-life Kerr made peace with it all, even if the path was brutal.
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