As the film “The Featherweight,” about the life of boxing great Willie Pep, enters wide release, this week a different BoxingScene contributor will reflect on a boxing biopic that resonates with them. Today: “Cinderella Man.”
“In all the history of the boxing game, you find no human interest story to compare with the life narrative of James J Braddock.”
The citation, from the great storyteller and journalist Damon Runyon, is certainly up for debate (even just among fighters from recent memory, Mike Tyson, Manny Pacquiao, Danny Jacobs and Dewey Bozella would probably like a word). But Runyon’s assessment, the marrow of it – that Braddock lived an implausible, larger-than-life existence – can’t be denied.
It’s also a helluva way to kick off a film.
And “Cinderella Man,” the 2005 blockbuster featuring Russell Crowe and Renee Zellweger and directed by Ron Howard, is nothing if not a series of big swings. From the actors and the hitmaker behind the camera to the dramatic boxing set pieces and soaring score to the broader, uniquely human themes of struggle, self-belief, love and redemption, the movie follows familiar formulas – those we’ve seen before not only in numerous sports flicks but also as a staple of Howard’s blockbuster canon. Yet when it comes to scratching the fundamental itch of moviegoers, “Cinderella Man” delivers as effectively (and occasionally refreshingly) as any boxing film you’ll find.
Set in 1930s New York, Jim Braddock (Crowe) is a former light-heavyweight contender who has fallen on hard times after a broken right hand essentially retired him from boxing. We get a glimpse of Braddock’s relatively well-to-do pre-Depression life, but in a heartbeat we leap with the fighter and his family from $850 fight purses and a warm homestead in New Jersey to a ramshackle tenement, a rising stack of overdue bills and dwindling work as a longshoreman.
Braddock’s wife Mae (Zellweger) is a dream, unflagging in her support of her husband and a stalwart source of sweetness and optimism for their three children in the face of relentlessly bleak circumstances. She’s a beacon in good times and bad, even after one of the children falls ill. In the same vein, Braddock is a proper protagonist-hero – a selfless family man who, at varying points in the narrative, convinces his hungry daughter that she’ll be helping him out by finishing his meager dinner and who parents with patience and understanding when his son steals food for the struggling family.
A bit too saccharine for your tastes? Without a doubt, the script occasionally sends even our better angels into eye-rolling fits. Propping up the plot are the occasional and unnecessary patches of exposition, and every so often, “Cinderella Man” seems a bit too intent on reminding us that this is a period piece, with deliveries that stir the ghosts of Jimmy Cagney and Joan Blondell. “Every time you get hit,” Mae pleads with Jim, “it feels like I’m getting hit, too.”
Howard has been known to traffic in the treacly, but critics have said as much about Steven Spielberg. And lest we forget, there’s an all-time cinematic boxing classic that won Best Picture and Best Director at the Academy Awards – and was also nominated for Best Screenplay – that featured more than its share of heartfelt speechifying, even if that dialogue was sometimes Sly-ly slurred.
“Cinderella Man” sprinkles healthy doses of grit into the sugar, with Jim reaching a breaking point of sorts and storming out on Mae after she sends their children to live with relatives. Their poverty is visceral, and Crowe – who also gave us ultra-alphas Bud White and Maximus Decimus Meridius – nails the quiet sweet spot between pride and exhaustion when, literally hat in hand and fresh from the relief office, he humbles himself to Madison Square Garden’s boxing power brokers. When Braddock tells them, “You know me well enough to know if I had anywhere else to go, I wouldn’t be here,” you believe it.
Then there’s Paul Giamatti, who brings a prickly humor to the proceedings as Braddock’s manager, Joe Gould. He busts balls with Crowe – “You gotta stop some of those lefts!” Gould implores between rounds in one fight, to which Braddock responds, “You see any getting past my head?” – and jousts repeatedly with Craig Bierko’s amped and murderous version of Max Baer. “You gonna punch him or pork him?” Gould shouts at Baer while the champ grimly toys with Braddock. Baer, firing back: “That’s your job, asshole!”
Not exactly the stuff of Disney. Like some of Howard’s other best work – “Apollo 13,” “Frost/Nixon” and “Rush” – the grand storytelling in “Cinderella Man” is effectively cut with high stakes, brisk pacing and strong performances. And as the conversations around boxing films inevitably turn, it’s worth noting that the fighting scenes check in somewhere between above average and quite good. Crowe is as fit as he has ever been, he and Bierko give solid accounts of themselves as prizefighters inside the ring, and Howard paints a textured picture of an era-specific boxing environment that doesn’t simply toss fedoras and cigar smoke at the audience.
After all this, you might ask, is “Cinderella Man” actually good? The answer, objectively, is “yes.” If not quite a critical masterpiece, the film has a built-in, big-screen story that is well executed and features clever and compelling performances. If your mood calls for the modern edge of “Bleed for This” or the relentless darkness of “Raging Bull,” this isn’t it. But if you can’t help soaking in the early-century setting of “The Great White Hope” and fall hard for the highs, lows and hints of delicious hamminess from “Rocky,” then “Cinderella Man” is two hours and 24 minutes very well spent.
Jason Langendorf is the former Boxing Editor of ESPN.com, has contributed to Ringside Seat and the Queensberry Rules, and has written about boxing for Vice, The Guardian, Chicago Sun-Times and other publications. A member of the Boxing Writers Association of America, he can be followed on X and LinkedIn, and emailed at dorf2112@hotmail.com.