There’s familiar, there’s formulaic, and then there’s Christy.
Despite being the true story of Christy Martin, the pioneering female boxer whose accomplishments include being represented by Don King and making the cover of Sports Illustrated, and who later survived a near-fatal attack by her husband, David Michôd’s biopic transforms its inspiring tale into the stuff of cinematic clichés.
As the profane and resolute pugilist, Sydney Sweeney gives a believable performance that almost transcends her role’s derivativeness. This manipulative hybrid of Rocky, Million Dollar Baby, and Monster, however, is so rote that even an A.I. wouldn’t dare try to pass it off as original.
Premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival, Christy stitches together a Little Engine That Could underdog saga, a domestic-assault drama, and a homophobia horrorshow, in the process hitting every award-baiting beat in existence.
That Sweeney, like Charlize Theron before her, tones down her movie-star looks to embody a violent and battered working-class woman who’s victimized by intolerant societal standards merely underscores the Hollywood machinery at play here.
Yet it’s Michôd, Katherine Fugate, and Mirrah Foulkes’ script that’s the film’s greatest weakness, throwing hackneyed haymakers with frenzied ferociousness. Throw in Antony Partos’s alternately sad and uplifting score, and you have a veritable smorgasbord of hoary conventions.
In Itmann, West Virgina, Christy enters a local boxing tournament and, without training, emerges victorious. That’s not nearly as important to her talkative and prejudiced mom Joyce Salters (Merritt Wever) and her silent and complicit father John (Ethan Embry) as the fact that rumors are swirling that Christy is running around with Rosie (Jess Gabor).
Christy resents her family for their narrow-mindedness but, after being discovered by a promoter who invites her to Tennessee for a bigger bout—which she promptly wins—she learns that lesbianism is a no-go in every part of the boxing world. If she didn’t have reason enough to retreat into the closet, her ensuing partnership with trainer Jim Martin (Ben Foster) provides all the push she needs; although he’s initially disinterested in working with a female fighter, he’s quickly converted into a believer as well as a suitor, and Joyce and John’s approval of their daughter’s new tradwife lifestyle is the final factor in her suppression of her sexuality.
For a time, Christy’s heteronormative routine works wonders for her career, since it helps offset her preeminent position in a male-dominated aggro field. Christy’s impressive string of knockouts earns her a meeting, and contract, with Don King (a scene-stealing Chad L. Coleman), and before long, she’s hit the big time. With that comes a newfound brashness and, also, a dash of self-hating vitriol, both of which manifest themselves at press-conference podiums where she slanders opponents, such as Lisa Holewyne (Katy O’Brian), with bigoted slurs.
While everything looks good on the outside, things are growing uglier behind closed doors, with Jim stalking her every move (he proposes to her after catching her meeting with Rosie), threatening that “If you leave me, I’ll kill you,” and forcing her to earn additional money by making creepy sexualized boxing videos with random strangers—a bit of pornographic exploitation that Christy keeps vague enough to be simultaneously disgusting and baffling.
The higher Christy climbs, the worse her life becomes, full of drugs and domination that Michôd dramatizes with too much glossiness to turn the stomach. Though his in-ring action is adequately muscular, it’s still monotonous and pedestrian.
Similarly, Sweeney convincingly performs like a rough-and-tumble brawler, but Christy is infatuated with training montages to convey her evolution from a raw talent into an unstoppable fists-of-fury force. The actress is only as good as the material will allow, and that’s not much.
Nonetheless, she’s more credible than her co-stars. With an extremely thin head of blonde hair and a paunch lurking beneath his awful shirts, Foster is his usually creepy self, starting off reserved and ordinary before his Jim blossoms into a full-blown monster. Joyce, meanwhile, begins as a fiend and never wavers, stranding Wever with simply one note to strike.
Christy’s portrait of the way in which society, and loved ones, incentivize self-deception and -loathing for their own repugnant ends rings true, as does its depiction of spousal abuse as both physical brutality and psychological torment. Michôd, alas, handles these serious issues in a simplistic and superficial manner, such that everything is spelled out (often through egregiously straightforward dialogue) and imagined in black-and-white terms.
Everyone is either a victim or a victimizer, as well as a friend or a foe, no matter that Lisa eventually looks past Christy’s nastiness to help train her, and even tries to convince Jim that having Christy square off against the younger, bigger, and hungrier Laila Ali is a recipe for disaster—a warning that Jim, of course, doesn’t heed because he’s a greedy sadist who wouldn’t dare miss an opportunity to profit off his spouse.
To compound its shortcomings, Christy takes an uncalled-for 135 minutes to relay its feel-bad-to-feel-good story, which climaxes with Jim’s attempted murder of his wife. This despicable act is bracing in its suddenness but is undercut by an aftermath of easy remedies and tearful breaking-point decisions.
The real-life Martin’s strength and resolve in the face of Jim’s horror is the stuff of rousing drama, and yet Michôd handles it with such polish that there’s never any inkling of real danger, urgency, or doubt that things won’t turn out for the best. When the proceedings then conclude with a series of happily-ever-afters, from miraculous recoveries and mended relationships to triumphant comebacks and new loves, the heartstring-tugging becomes insistent and strained.
Christy is proof that just because a true tale is touching doesn’t mean that it’s cut out for big-screen treatment; desperate to elicit crowd-pleasing gasps and cheers, the film never takes an aesthetic or narrative chance that might lend it grit, terror, or lyricism.
Channeling her character’s pain and rage with an authenticity that she’s only sporadically exhibited before (most notably, in Reality), Sweeney confirms that she’s capable of making headlines for more than just her jeans.
Unfortunately, Michôd’s clunky biopic fails to rise to her level or, for that matter, to distinguish itself from the innumerable genre ancestors it liberally imitates.
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