Christy: Solid Acting by Sydney Sweeney, a Tired Genre and a Gut-Punch Finish
By Jim Slotek
Rating: B
It’s fair to say Sydney Sweeney deglamorizes well in the movie Christy. The industry has demanded as much from its serious actresses since Charlize Theron played serial killer Aileen Wuornos, and Sweeney is being taken increasingly seriously these days.
It’s another thing to sit through the end credits, to see footage and photos of the real female boxing champ Christy Martin and be shocked by what a lifetime of taking punches – not to mention eventually bullets - can do to a person, particularly one with as brutal a life as hers.
It’s a wakeup call for anyone who’s watched the entire movie accepting Sweeney is an actual facsimile of Martin, the so-called “Coal Miner’s Daughter.” The nickname alone conjures up Loretta Lynn, and a genre of celebrity biopic whose tropes now weigh heavily on nearly every director who revisits it.
Christy also belongs to something of a sub-genre, biopics about women with raw talent who fall under the spell of, and even marry, their brutal Svengali managers (What’s Love Got to Do With It, Star 80, etc.).
But as mired in its genre as Christy is, every actor in it is better than the movie. Sweeney plays Martin as convincingly tough and inwardly vulnerable, all the way back to high school in small-town West Virginia, when she answers the homophobic taunts of a mean girl with a knockout punch.
Martin had a contradictory complexity. She was closeted, but adopted a girl-next-door image complete with pink frilly clothes (a look created by her violently controlling manager/husband Jim Martin, played with absolute villainy by the always solid Ben Foster) and openly and publicly taunted same-sex fellow women boxers.
Yet she was the one who made women’s boxing happen, an unbeatable champion who crusaded for bigger paydays for the sport, and its most recognizable face until the debut of Martin’s eventual formidable nemesis Laila Ali (Naomi Graham).
The two orbit the inescapable, Las Vegas-based gravity-well of the boxing world’s evil genius, Don King, played with laugh-out-loud hilarity by Chad L. Coleman. His scenes, even when he’s coyly revealing his ruthless and vindictive side, add a few laughs to an otherwise grueling life story of addiction, competitive fall from grace and domestic violence.
And as if the movie didn’t have enough in the way of villainy, Merritt Wever plays Martin’s Biblically disapproving mother, who repeatedly looks the other way when her daughter reaches out for help. It may be one-dimensional, but it’s one well-acted dimension.
Christy is ultimately a redemptive story, complete with the discovery of an actual loving relationship. But the road to redemption is rough on the character and, at times, the audience.
Still, it has a certain NASCAR charm (particularly in the early scenes), and characters who effectively carry it forward.
Christy. Directed by David Michôd. Stars Sydney Sweeney, Ben Foster, Chad L. Coleman. Opens in theatres, Friday, November 7.