Christy

Christy Martin is one of the great female boxers in the history of the sport. This film may not be one of the great boxing films, but it is a fine work full of thought and emotion. With Christy, director and co-writer David Michod, has crafted a work that is a slow burn. It is much like a boxer playing a long game, getting a viewer along the ropes, tiring them out and then landing a series of knockout blows late in the ninth round. The cumulative effect takes a while to get to but the payoff is worth the investment. None of this would work, however, without a special performance by Sydney Sweeney.

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Yes, Sweeney is someone known for her looks and often ignored in terms of her skill as an actress, but here she reveals a depth and humanity, a true vulnerability, that is unexpected, raw and real. Without her complete commitment to this role, the film would fail. Ben Foster, as her abusive manager/trainer/husband, is given what is mostly a rather thankless and flat part, as is the great Merritt Weaver, as Christy’s homophobic mother.

This is a story about identity, freedom versus control and boxing is simply a backdrop, though one in which the scenes are well shot and edited. You will never mistake this for Raging Bull, but you are not meant to. Here, it is what happens between and before or after the punches, that really counts. As we are introduced to Christy, she is an up and coming boxer who has been seeing the same girl since high school, a fact her coal mining father and devoutly southern protestant mother, disprove of.

Her mother disproves so much that she becomes, at times, an accomplice to the physical and mental abuse her son in law perpetrates on her daughter. The dynamic between Weaver and Sweeney is a subtle yet powerful one and the thread the film follows is one of the more satisfying in the picture. Another, of course, is Christy’s love of boxing, and how it is an escape from the lies she is forced to live because of others.

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As good as the film ultimately is, there are times where it is such a slow burn that you can be forgiven for wanting to give up. This is a trait shared by Michod’s other films, in particular his Animal Kingdom. Yet, giving up on the film before that third act, denies one the catharsis sorely needed. It is the point where everything coalesces and the emotions reach a crescendo that, in retrospect, seem inevitable.

Without spoiling the events of this true story, the final twenty five or thirty minutes play out like a short film thriller, and rank as the best work Michod, Sweeney, Foster or Weaver, have yet done. It is a shame that Weaver and Foster have to wait so long to show what they are capable of, but when asked to bring their best, they more than deliver. The conversation between Weaver and Sweeney, after a horrible occurrence, is one that is so thick with tension and years of assumed trauma, it could be cut with a knife.

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The film does spend much of the time hiding itself, which is part of the ethos and point of the thing. Yet, it feels as though a film that opened up a little more, allowed us to get to feel these people a bit more and invest in things even more, prior to that final act, would have been one that is more memorable. As it is, we have a film that is not among the years very best yet still very well made. This is a film which does feature an outstanding conclusion that shows how to bring together character arc and emotional through lines, and which features a brave performance by an actress unfairly ignored because of her physical beauty. Spoilers were largely avoided here because it is the unfolding of the story, for the viewer, where the film gets so much power. If curious, see it for yourself.

Christy opens in theaters on November 7th.