The best Hollywood movies sweep us out of our seats into another time, another place, another lifestyle, and, perhaps most importantly, another psyche. There should almost be an undeniable feeling that the characters are making up the story as they go, the way our own life stories are formed.
In Antoine Fuqua’s latest film Southpaw, despite a notable but one-dimensional lead performance from Jake Gyllenhaal, we never buy in. Moment to moment, Southpaw is fighting between the authenticity of performances from Jake Gyllenhaal and Forrest Whitaker and the fraudulence of Kurt Sutter’s screenplay and Fuqua’s over-direction.
Billy Hope, the boxer whose name is used as a payoff so someone can yell at the end “hope has won,” grew up in an orphanage before harnessing his anger to become the light heavyweight champion and one of the best fighters of all time. His wife, Maureen Hope, who also happened to be raised in the same orphanage, fears for her husband’s health after a 47–0 run and a few too many blows to the head.
After a tragedy, Billy has to raise his daughter while managing his crumbling economic and psychological situations. His girl is eventually taken under the custody of social services (the way he was as a child, which he swore would never happen to his girl), and Billy has to put his life back together to win back the belt and his family.
Boxing and wrestling as sports lend themselves to cinema easily: as plot device they are powerful metaphors for the characters’ internal feelings, yet also a violent expression of them. Visually, there is potential for the screen to dance through shuffling camera movements and jab-like cuts. Fuqua hardly tapped into the narrative or aesthetic possibilities; instead, he favors cliches and a style that only sometimes rises above banality.
Where the first half of the film feels like it is shot as a sportscast — with lots of coverage and angles but little intrigue in any of the compositions or movements — the latter part feels equally over-directed, with montages and an unforgettably laughable slow-motion shot that is the film’s climax.
If you’ve seen Rocky, Raging Bull, or any of the ripoffs they inspired, you can predict almost every scene in the film, including the trite training montage where “Eye of the Tiger” is replaced by Eminem’s “Phenomenon.” There’s nothing that breaks the mold, but there is nothing to make us believe it either.
A lack of restraint can be seen in every aspect of the filmmaking: almost every scene tries to wring out tears from viewers like they’re wet towels, with an overused score, exaggerated plotting, and over-the-top performances; the real problem, though, is that there’s nothing here to make the towel wet in the first place, nothing to snatch us from our thoughts into Billy Hope’s.
Jake Gyllenhaal does his best to capture the physicality of the role, selling the emotional torment and physical agony with little subtext or depth other than the contrived plot he’s been put in by Fuqua and Sutter. They’re always interfering to amplify forced symbolism like a boxing fight at a church, and shamefully forced heart-tugging moments like when the commentator reminds the audience the stake of the final fight for Billy after every round.
There is an incredibly ironic instance where the commentator describes how Billy Hope has decided to enter the ring without music because it would distract from the power of the moment. The same couldn’t be said for Southpaw; whenever Gyllenhaal comes close to finding poignancy in this artificial schlock, Fuqua is screaming to be recognized. We never feel like the film is making itself up as it goes.
