Review

Southpaw

Billy Hope (Jake Gyllenhaal) is a fighter willing to sustain a lot of punishment in Antoine Fuqua’s old-school boxing film "Southpaw."
Billy Hope (Jake Gyllenhaal) is a fighter willing to sustain a lot of punishment in Antoine Fuqua’s old-school boxing film "Southpaw."

Billy Hope (Jake Gyllenhaal) spends much of the first half of this boxing-as-redemption story draped in blood, fresh or dried, either his own, his opponent's or, tragically, that of his loving, doting wife, Maureen (Rachel McAdams), his childhood sweetheart, who also grew up in a New York orphanage.

Maureen is inadvertently shot by a member of the entourage of Miguel Escobar (Miguel Gomez), a hungry up-and-comer in Billy's light heavyweight division, after an altercation at a charity event. Her death comes at a precipitous time in Billy's life: His conniving manager, Jordan (50 Cent), has gotten him to the top of the fight game, but at the expense of Billy's body, repeatedly bloodied and beaten by his challengers. Billy's strategy basically involves getting hit in the face enough to really get angry and unleash hell on his opponent.

Southpaw

85 Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Rachel McAdams, Forest Whitaker, Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson, Oona Laurence, Naomie Harris, Rita Ora, Clare Foley, Beau Knapp, Victor Ortiz, Miguel Gomez

Director: Antoine Fuqua

Rating: R, for language throughout, and some violence

Running time: 123 minutes

When Maureen dies, Billy loses his mind and takes a bad downward spiral of poor decisions and manic grief, ultimately causing him to to lose his house, his boxing license, and, eventually, his and Maureen's young daughter, Leila (Oona Lawrence), a wizened, bespectacled 10-year-old saddled with her mother's intelligence and concern for Billy, but little of the agency to do much to help him. Leila is sent to a foster care facility, Billy is thrown out in the street, and just about everything falls apart for him. Except for, as you might have guessed, the fight game that spawned his success in the first place. With nowhere else to turn, the sweet science stages a siren's call of potential atonement.

As boxing flicks are nearly always about redemption, specifically of the blue-collar variety, with lots of blood, bruises and questioning of manhood, there's little doubt where director Antoine Fuqua's film is headed. After Billy bottoms out, he takes a janitorial job at an upper Harlem gym and eventually gets taken under the wing of a gruff boxing trainer named Tick Wills (Forest Whitaker), who teaches him the fine art of actually blocking punches with something other than exposed areas of his face.

Like Rocky before him, Billy comes to Tick more of a street brawler than a trained fighter, but under the older man's careful tutelage -- and Yoda-like points of wisdom -- Billy begins to remake himself as a skilled boxer rather than bloody punching bag. All of which comes in handy when eventually Jordan, who dropped him at his lowest ebb, returns to offer him a chance to fight Escobar.

You could say that no cliched stone gets unturned here, if only it weren't a cliche to say that in the first place. Along with the pugnacious, lethally short-tempered Billy, you have a rogue's gallery of boxing movie standbys, including the wise, old manager (who initially refuses to train him, of course), the shady promoter willing to bleed his fighters dry to eke out every dollar of value from them, the angelic child who only wants what's best for her father and, naturally, a villainous foe, as cocky as he is underhanded.

Of these, Billy is the only one given anything much more than two dimensions in Kurt Sutter's screenplay, and that is largely because of the yeoman work of Gyllenhaal, who has proved in past films (the excellent Nightcrawler being the most recent) that he's willing to dive so deeply into his roles there's nobody recognizable on the other side. When we first see Billy's face, it's coming at us in slo-mo, sweat and blood sheeting off his skin and bleeding through his black mouth-guard as he screams something unintelligible to the unfortunate soul across from him in the ring.

As Gyllenhaal plays him, however, he's only partially that nightmarish vision; he softens considerably with his small family and tries very much to live up to his late wife's expectations of him as a father and a human soul. Because Gyllenhaal has gone all in on the role, he gives Billy edges and nuances that would have easily been lost with another actor.

Fuqua also backs off just enough with his camera to let the film breathe a little. He doesn't rush us from moment to moment -- other than in the obligatory training montage with Billy pounding his stomach with medicine balls, flipping giant truck tires, and dancing between strung-up ropes in Tick's ring -- and he allows his actors enough space to work their way through their scenes at their own pace. By the time the big fight comes, in Las Vegas, with Jim Lampley and Roy Jones Jr. at ringside calling the bout for HBO, you might know exactly where its headed, but you're still reasonably hooked.

The fight scenes themselves are well choreographed and a good deal more authentic looking that Balboa vs. Creed. Fuqua's Italian director of photography, Mauro Fiore, has seen fit to sneak in some headache-inducing point of view shots as the fighters take their lumps, an effect that actually rattles your skull a bit, but the single significant draw here is Gyllenhaal's gutsy performance, as emotionally raw and bloodletting as any one of the champ's title bouts. Cleansed of his sins in a wash of blood and redemptive emotional agony, Billy is at last ready to grow into his responsibilities: I suppose some stories never get old.

MovieStyle on 07/24/2015

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