Cinderella Man
Produced and distributed by Universal Pictures and Miramax Films
Directed by Ron Howard
Screenplay by Cliff Hollingsworth and Akiva Goldsman

Batman Begins
Produced and distributed by Warner Brothers
Directed by Christopher Nolan
Screenplay by David S. Goyer

Boxing has always been a favorite subject for screenwriters.  No other sport accommodates their mythomaniacal instincts quite so well.  In Body and Soul (1947), Abraham Polonsky dramatized his Marxist analysis of American capitalism to disturbing effect.  Seven years later, Budd Schulberg, having been bruised by Marxist analysts himself, turned the tables with On the Waterfront, in which proletarian middleweight Marlon Brando defeats a gaggle of union goons standing in for the strong-arm wing of the American Communist Party.  In the 70’s, Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky kayoed the cheap cynicism of an entire decade.

Ron Howard’s beautifully made Cinderella Man works in the same tradition and boasts fine performances from all its principals, especially Russell Crowe and Paul Giamatti.  Its achievements are eclipsed, however, by its casual disregard for truth.

This is not a yarn with boxing as its central metaphor.  It is supposed to be the story of James Braddock (Crowe), an Irish-American boxer whose career paralleled America’s boom-and-bust fortunes from the 1920’s to the 30’s.  Howard wants us to believe that we are beholding the trials of the Great Depression refracted through the experience of one indomitable individual.  He has even slapped documentary-style captions onto the foot of the screen to identify key events in Braddock’s career.  The appeal of Braddock’s story is easy to understand.  He was the archetypal underdog defying all expectations.  After being forced into early Palookaville at 28, he made an unlikely comeback, establishing himself as a legitimate world heavyweight contender, a feat that prompted no less a wordsmith than Damon Runyon to call him the Cinderella Man.

For all its show of realism, Howard’s film is deeply fraudulent.  He and his writers Cliff Hollingsworth and Akiva Goldsman are so intent on making Braddock an iconic working-class hero that they have carefully tidied up his life and, for strictly dramatic purposes, slandered Max Baer, the man he would fight for the heavyweight championship in 1935.

Howard has smoothed away Braddock’s rougher edges to give us a portrait of an almost saintly prizefighter who fought only to provide for his wife Mae (Renée Zellweger) and their three children.  There is no indication that Braddock ran a Hoboken speakeasy during Prohibition and occasionally ran afoul of the Bergen County police, decking a precinct captain with his powerful right cross on one particularly trying night.  Howard ignores such episodes, lest they detract from his inspirational allegory.  Whatever the facts, Braddock must stand for the grit and resilience of American individualism, and that’s that.

The film shows Braddock starting out as a promising fighter, only to have his career temporarily derailed when he repeatedly broke his right hand on the skulls of various opponents.  As the nation entered the Great Depression, he found himself unable to fight.  Without other skills, he turned to irregular, poorly paid shape-up jobs on the Hoboken docks.  Like many others, he soon fell behind.  Milk delivery was stopped for nonpayment.  Electricity and gas were turned off.  His children went hungry and sick, and Mae became frantic.  So much is true, but it is not enough for Howard.  He shows us Braddock signing up for government home relief to feed his starving family and later repaying the funds after he returns to the ring.  This looks exceptionally noble, but Howard leaves out that it was not public-spiritedness alone that drove Braddock to repay the money.  He was squelching bad publicity.  There had been complaints.  Some thought it unseemly for a prize fighter to accept government support, especially when he had fans working in the relief department.

By Hollywood standards, such fudging is a venial sin hardly worth mentioning, except that it exists side by side with a whopping mortal offense: the shameless defamation of Max Baer.  As played by Craig Bierko, Baer is made out to be an arrogant, preening thug who boastfully capitalized on the fact that he killed two men in the ring.  This is libelous.  Baer did kill a fighter named Frankie Campbell in 1930, but it could hardly be said to be his fault.  It happened because the referee failed to stop the bout when he should have.  Far from boasting about it, Baer was so deeply distressed afterward that he almost quit the ring.  Later, he helped Campbell’s widow pay for her children’s education.  As for the other opponent, Ernie Schaaf, there’s no evidence Baer was responsible.  After his bout with Baer, Schaaf went on to fight another four men before he expired.  As for Baer, far from taking pride in his killer prowess, he would never be the same boxer again—except, possibly, in his 1933 match with German champion Max Schmeling.  Yet Howard portrays Baer as a callous bully glorying in his brutal reputation.  Meeting Braddock and his wife in a restaurant on the eve of their fight, Howard’s Baer suggests Braddock back out of the match since Mae is “too pretty to be a widow.”  Then, turning to Mae herself, he adds leeringly, “On second thought, you can always come to me for comfort.”  This is not dramatic license; it is a damn lie.

Only a screenwriter as contemptuous of truth as Goldsman could suggest Baer was a bully.  The truth is, Baer exasperated his manager and fans for letting up on opponents after Campbell’s death.  When he fought Primo Carnera for the championship in 1934, he repeatedly urged the referee to stop the bout once he realized the Venetian giant could no longer protect himself.  Anyone familiar with boxing knows how foolhardy such compassion is in the ring.  Wounded opponents can be exceedingly dangerous, especially in the heavyweight division, where a moment’s inattention can invite a bomb from the blue that will cost a boxer the fight, if not his life.  But Baer chose to run this risk rather than inflict further damage on the apparently helpless Carnera.  This is not the film’s version, however.  In keeping with his decision to make Baer the villain, Howard shows him sneering at the beaten man as he gleefully pummels him senseless.

Then there is the Star of David that Baer wore on his boxing trunks.  It appears in the film probably in deference to the contemporary photos of Baer in the ring.  Nevertheless, Howard studiously avoids addressing the religious emblem directly.  Too bad.  It is essential to understanding Baer’s character.  Baer’s father was half Jewish; his mother, Scotch-Irish; they brought him up in a nominally Catholic household.  When he was preparing to fight Schmeling, his Jewish manager, Ancil Hoffman, decided to play up his Semitic background.  He thought it would be good publicity and perhaps motivate the notoriously lackadaisical Baer.  And so Baer agreed to wear a Star of David into the ring to fight Hitler’s boxer.  (That Schmeling was neither a Nazi nor a Hitler supporter did not deter Hoffman, who seems to have regarded boxing, not unreasonably, as a just another lucrative department of showbiz.)

After defeating Schmeling, Baer decided to wear the Jewish emblem in all his subsequent matches.  More than its publicity value, he was making a principled protest against what was happening to Jews in Germany at a time when all too many Americans were content to look the other way.  Baer was neither a saint nor an idealist.  His carousing, womanizing, and lack of professionalism were legendary.  But he unquestionably harbored a considerable measure of decency.  Unforgivably, this film strips Baer of his good reputation.  In film reviews across the country, Baer has been dishonored, being called “slimy,” “infamous,” and worse.  The Kansas City Star’s review referred to him as a “testosterone-fueled brute.”

Howard and Goldsman needed a villain to craft their sweetly inspirational fairy tale, and Baer happened to be handy.  They are entirely comfortable with such lying.  Consider their portrait of John Nash in A Beautiful Mind.  They felt free to transform the Nobel-prize-winning mathematician into a right-wing looney.  In keeping with their conventionally liberal politics, they preferred to have him hunting commies under every Middle American bed than to reveal that his schizophrenia drove him to leftist antics, such as briefly defecting to East Germany in 1960.

Howard’s slanderous portrayal of Baer’s character is all the more objectionable because his film is so well made and performed.  He has fully captured the Depression’s bleakness, steeping his scenes in dark sepia tones.  In many shots, Mae and Braddock appear in heavily shadowed profile, their faces disappearing into a void that threatens to engulf them.  We catch glimpses of their children making do with discarded items for their recreation: a bedspring for a trampoline, an abandoned jalopy for a playhouse.  When their gas and electric are turned off, we see Mae and the children tearing down the lattice work under an Esso sign for firewood.

The fight scenes are equally convincing.  In fact, they seem to have been choreographed punch for punch according to the newspaper reports of the time retailed in several books—most notably, Jeremy Schaap’s compelling and balanced (although somewhat exuberantly titled) Cinderella Man: James J. Braddock, Max Baer, and the Greatest Upset in Boxing History.  Tellingly, Schaap’s book is not mentioned as a source on the movie’s official website.  Evidently, Howard and Goldsman deemed Schaap’s factual account unsuitable to their needs.

The film is partially rescued by Crowe and Giamatti.  Although too old and too small to play Braddock, Crowe nevertheless makes you believe in his character.  There is an alchemy in Crowe’s performances that defies analysis.  Like the greatest film actors—Frederick March, Marlon Brando, Richard Burton, and Gene Hackman come to mind—he knows how to be still in front of the camera and simply inhabit his character.  His intensity and focus are truly remarkable.  Here, he is matched by Giamatti, playing his perfect foil.  Giamatti is the faithful wheeler-dealer manager, Joe Gould, a little man with a big mouth whose ceaseless promotional patter in Braddock’s cause provides eloquent counterpoint to the boxer’s silent integrity.  As one ring impresario aptly says of Gould, “They ought to put [his] mouth in a circus.”  The man of words and the man of action come together as an unstoppable force, and, while the film is running at least, it is difficult not to be swept along in the tide of their loyalty to each other.

If you want to see a film that honors its origins, try director Chris Nolan’s Batman Begins, a dark, dank meditation on Bob Kane’s vengeful knight.  But do not take the younger kids.  Although there is no gore, the violent action is grim, relentless, and, most disturbingly, shot at such close quarters as to be visually overwhelming, if not just plain confusing.  What’s more, as Batman, Christian Bale is truly menacing, flashing in and out of impenetrable shadows, his voice inhumanly metallic.  In one scene, a deranged culprit has a vision of the real Batman.  From beneath the bat cowl emerges not Bruce Wayne but a snarling black beast, the very embodiment of implacable vengeance.

In his bid to reinvigorate the Batman franchise, Nolan has paid full—one might say morbid—respect to Wayne’s tortured origins.  His fear of bats, the killing of his parents, and his grief and confusion are all meticulously dramatized.  Furthermore, we learn how he came to don the cowl and cape.  He took ninja training from Liam Neeson—who else?—somewhere on what appears to be the lower slopes of the Himalayas.  “To conquer fear, you must become fear,” intones the warrior, seemingly on leave from Star Wars.

Although intriguing, this Batman is overly plotted and too monochromatically stygian for its own good.  The new Batman uniform is symptomatic: It is solidly black.  In Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman, the costume’s darkness was relieved by the splash of yellow in its bat insignia, crafted to suggest at once a menacing bat and a wickedly toothy smile.  For his next installment, Nolan needs to find his colorful Joker.