Reviewed - Cinderella Man: Russell Crowe is powerfully cast as a Depression-era boxer in this remarkably evocative feel- good epic, writes Donald Clarke
ONE might reasonably argue that the two greatest convulsions in the history of the United States were the Civil War and the Great Depression. Yet the latter event, ill suited to an art form addicted to happy endings, has, at least in terms of its effect on urban areas, been largely ignored by commercial cinema.
Ron Howard's treatment of the slump in this irresistibly mainstream entertainment is both as subtle and effective as a good, sharp punch in the face. Like the same director's Apollo 13 (still his best film), Cinderella Man sets out to grab the cynical and kick that part of them that doesn't believe in heroes until it softens into apolitical jelly. It succeeds.
A true story so preposterously unlikely film-makers have hitherto left it well alone, Cinderella Man begins with James Braddock, a reasonably successful heavyweight boxer, returning to his New Jersey home after an evening's brawling.
It is a quintessential Howard scene: a man may win the title, go to the moon and back or chat-up a mermaid, but he is nothing unless he can walk in the door of an evening and embrace his supportive wife. Suddenly, in a whiplash flash-forward, we are jolted out of Howardville to discover the Braddock family living in poor-but-proud squalor in a basement apartment. The boxer, unable to fight after breaking his hand, is forced to work as stevedore. Then he gets offered the chance to get smacked around by a young contender. Great things follow.
Howard has somewhere rounded up a legion of extras with the knobbly, asymmetric faces you usually only find in the photographs of Weegee. Few movie stars other than Russell Crowe - his ears sticking out perkily, his skin oddly sallow - could stand before these crowds without looking impossibly modern, but the Antipodean phone hurler has a grim solidity to him that sits quite nicely with the period detail. (Over Renée Zellweger's hopeless attempt to make something of the drippy wife role we had best draw a forgiving veil.)
Whereas A Beautiful Mind, the last collaboration between Crowe, Howard and writer Akiva Goldman, was coming down with patronising tricksiness, Cinderella Man makes a virtue of its sheer bloody obviousness. The sepia tints, the unfair demonisation of Braddock's great rival Max Baer, Paddy Considine's role as the representative of those who didn't make it encourage us to prepare a fist ready for the punching of air when the credits roll. Is that really such a bad thing?
