this woman’s work

Russell Crowe, Renee Zellweger and Paul Giametti were fabulous, as you’d expect. There were some nice shots, too. And Brett and I both cried pretty much through the whole first hour.

BUT there’s this Bad Guy in it and he was so darn bad that I went and looked him up on the web afterwards to find out if he was really as rotten as Ron Howard directed him to be.

In the movie Max Baer has killed two men with his boxing prowess and is hell bent on killing Jim Braddock, too. He gleefully taunts Braddock at a restaurant, offering to comfort his wife once she’s a widow and he’s an animal in the ring. Basically he’s a typical Hollywood villain out to thwart the good guy.

So. The real Max Baer was, I read, a pretty nice guy and gracious when he lost the fight to Braddock. Says Wikipedia, “The author of the book on which the movie was based has asserted that Baer was kind, charismatic, loved and respected, and pointed out the emotional pain that Baer endured the rest of his life following Campbell’s death [the boxer he killed in the ring], and the fact that he gave purses from his bouts to Campbell’s family to help give Campbell’s children an education.”

Not that the guy was perfect, especially compared to good guy Braddock. From a Slate article about the film:

That studiously determined upstart turned out to be gritty Jimmy Braddock from the Jersey docks, known by the more fitting “Plain Jim” before Damon Runyon tagged him “Cinderella Man.” Braddock’s tale is indeed inspiring: He had a family to feed while Baer’s expenses ran mostly to his wardrobe and his mistresses. Baer Jr. cheerfully admits that his father was woefully unprepared. “He didn’t take Braddock seriously, he didn’t train, and he got a b.j. before the fight,” he says, apparently listing the offenses in ascending order of gravity.

So Baer gets tagged as a villain for a whole generation (and then some what with DVDs and cable television) despite being a nice fellow but Ron Howard was making a film and he decided the film needed a villain so that’s ok, right? All in the name of art. Well.

I was thinking about this for two reasons: One, because as a writer of personal narrative I’m interested in fictionalized accounts of actual events. Ron Howard doesn’t pretend to be making a documentary but the whole “true story” schtick is a selling point so you gotta take it into consideration. I’m just wondering to myself, how much responsibility does he have to at least play it close to the truth? This isn’t the stuff of legends; it’s the stuff of newspaper accounts. There are verifiable facts. But then — and I think this is interesting — one of the accounts I read says that Baer’s portrayal in the movie is very close to his portrayal in the press at the time. So you could argue that Howard filmed an actual fictionalized narrative sold as truth by journalists; a sort of alternative reality of an historic event.

I find that kind of an interesting idea although I don’t think it justifies smearing a dead man’s reputation further. That leads me to the second reason I was thinking about it.

I think it would have been a more interesting movie if he had shown the real Max — the one getting blow jobs before the fight and who said after his loss to Baer (Wikipedia adds that he said it “cheerfully”), “Jim fought a good fight and I hope he’s more appreciative of the title than I was.”

Ron Howard said through a spokesperson, “The script was written from the point of view of the Braddock family. To them, Max Baer Sr. was a real threat.” Ok, fine. But then focus on them feeling that threat — the press conference where a journalist asks Renee’s character how she feels about her husband perhaps dying in the ring, that was pretty good. I got a feeling of “threat” there. I don’t need to be further hammered over the head with the idea that Max was scary. As a movie goer, I didn’t need the defamation of this guy’s character to get the idea that going into the ring with him was frightening. The whole good guy/bad guy scenario was so overblown that it drove me to Wikipedia, right? It made me doubt the film; it made me more aware that it was a film. It was too pat and too convenient to be convincing. I think Howard could have just gone with filiming Max’s showboating and womanizing, his casual devil-may-care attitude and let that contrast with Braddock returning his relief money (once he’d made good on a fight even though his kids were still wearing rags). To my writerly mind, that’s a good enough story.

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