It’s a proven strategy for a celebrity looking to be taken seriously as an actor – deglamorize yourself so you’re almost unrecognizable from the face most people know from magazine covers. Think Halle Berry in “Monster’s Ball” or Charlize Theron in “Monster.” If you’re playing a real person, even better.
I have no idea if Sydney Sweeney will get award season love for the title role in “Christy,” by David Michod (“Animal Kingdom”). But the movie is solid, and Sweeney (who has nothing to prove as an actor after films like “Immaculate”) delivers a ferocious, unvarnished performance in the title role.
Christy Martin wasn’t just the top professional female boxer in the 1990s – she was professional female boxing in that era, getting on the cover of Sports Illustrated and getting big paydays under legendary promoter Don King. “Christy” recounts both her rise as a boxer in the ring and the abuse she survived outside the ring at the hands of her trainer/husband, Jim Martin (Ben Foster).
Sweeney completely submerges her star power into Christy – it’s not just that she hides her looks under a bad ‘90s perm and lack of makeup. She moves like a fighter through the world, wary and tough. We first meet Christy as a scrappy, aimless young woman in West Virginia coal mining country. She’s queer, a fact she hides from her conservative parents (Merritt Wever and Ethan Embry). She enters an amateur fighting competition and finds out she’s good at throwing punches, even though she looks to be about half the age (and half the size) of her opponents.
Her prowess in the ring gets the attention of Martin, a small-timer who we can tell instantly is bad news for Christy. Foster, whose run of creeps in movies is almost unmatched, plays Martin as a soft-spoken Svengali who calmly and cruelly manipulates every aspect of Christy’s life, including denying her true sexual orientation. When she marries him, your heart sinks.
What’s heartbreakingly clear is that, no matter how famous she gets, Christy is utterly alone in the world, surrounded by manipulators and sycophants who she cannot rely on. At least, in the ring, she could be alone on her own terms.
The movie follows her rise in the ranks of professional boxing. In early bouts, she still seems like a teenage girl, leaping and yelling gleefully after a knockout like she had just gotten a new bike for Christmas. As she matures and hardens, she becomes a consummate trash-talker in the ring, determined to destroy her opponents emotionally as well as physically.
The screenplay by Michod and Mirrah Foulkes (who are married) suggests that Christy’s appetite for dishing out pain to other female boxers, and withstanding it herself, might have been her subconsciously battling her own actual sexual identity. What’s heartbreakingly clear is that, no matter how famous she gets, Christy is utterly alone in the world, surrounded by manipulators and sycophants who she cannot rely on. At least, in the ring, she could be alone on her own terms.
As the years pass and Christy’s fame starts to dip, tensions rise between her and Jim, and “Christy” becomes less of a sports movie and more of a wrenching domestic drama. The film is unsparing in its depiction of domestic abuse, both physical and psychological. (If you don’t know what happened in real life, part of me doesn’t want to spoil it, and part of me wants you to Google it first to help you sit through some truly traumatic moments.)
“Christy” is a little long at 135 minutes, and probably tries to pack a little too much of her life into its running time. And, when it comes to movies about female boxers, I prefer the underseen “The Fire Inside,” which possessed more emotional depth and nuance about the lives of its characters.
But this is a harrowing and effective film that, if you can stay standing in the ring with it, is worth seeing.
“Christy” opens in theaters Nov. 7. In Madison, it will play at Marcus Point, Marcus Palace and AMC Fitchburg.