\n<\/p>\n
\n\tStarting with his breakthrough feature, the simmering Australian crime family saga Animal Kingdom<\/em>, David Mich\u00f4d has leaned frequently into dark material. There\u2019s grit but also lugubriousness in Christy<\/em>, an inspirational sports movie that morphs in somewhat ungainly style into an unflinching depiction of domestic violence. It\u2019s only when that ugliness creeps in that the director seems fully engaged. Until then, it\u2019s a pedestrian and numbingly repetitive drama in which the stakes just never seem all that high. We watch Sydney Sweeney as real-life \u201890s boxing star Christy Martin land one power punch after another, felling a stream of opponents without ever acquiring much dimension as a character.<\/p>\n \n\tOpening in early November, the film will be the inaugural release for the newly formed U.S. distribution arm of indie production outfit Black Bear. They better hope not too many of their potential audience have caught up with Rachel Morrison\u2019s The Fire Inside<\/em>, a far more trenchant and emotional study of a young female boxer who overcame adversity to become an Olympic competitor.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\tChristy\t\t<\/p>\n<\/h3>\n \n\t\t\t\t\tThe Bottom Line<\/span> \tWatchable enough, but no knockout. \t\t\t\t\t\t\tVenue<\/strong>: Toronto International Film Festival (Special Presentations) \n\tMich\u00f4d is a very capable craftsman, so there\u2019s nothing inherently lacking in the movie except surprise \u2014 at least until Ben Foster, playing Jim Martin, the trainer that Christy married, goes full psycho.<\/p>\n \n\tChristy is a West Virginia college basketball player who enters a local boxing contest seemingly on a whim and demonstrates such a punishing straight-right punch that she\u2019s soon snapped up by Tennessee promoter Larry (Bill Kelly) and winning fight after fight. <\/p>\n \n\tFor a movie in which people are constantly getting slammed in the head or guts, there\u2019s little tangible conflict for much of its protracted running time. Christy just seems to breeze through, from novice to welterweight champion, presented to feverish boxing fans as \u201cThe Coal Miner\u2019s Daughter,\u201d with no apologies to Loretta Lynn or Sissy Spacek.<\/p>\n \n\tAny concern that Christy\u2019s parents, John (Ethan Embry) and Joyce (Merritt Wever), might have about their daughter pursuing a career in a violent sport are outweighed by their fear of scandal. A phone call from the mother of Rosie (Jess Gabor), her girlfriend since high school, puts Christy\u2019s folks on high alert. \u201cWhat you\u2019re doing isn\u2019t normal and we want you to have a normal, happy life,\u201d says Joyce, the soft sweetness in her voice making the sting of her words more potent in Wever\u2019s typically excellent performance.<\/p>\n \n\tWhen Larry sends her to train with Jim Martin, he advises Christy to take her mother along to meet him. \u201cJim\u2019s a family man,\u201d says Larry, nodding pointedly at Rosie to indicate that having a girlfriend might not go over well. That should fire up the drama with the tension of Christy having to hide her sexuality. But neither the script by Mich\u00f4d and Mirrah Foulkes nor Sweeney\u2019s performance gives the queer angle much depth.<\/p>\n \n\tChristy\u2019s first meeting with Jim reveals him to be a discourteous jerk, who rolls his eyes at the idea of \u201clady boxers\u201d and looks to offload her quickly by having a male sparring partner make short work of her. But after taking one hit she then knocks him to the mat, forcing Jim to concede that she may be a natural.<\/p>\n \n\tSweeney trained extensively and thickened up for the role, initially wearing a dark quasi-mullet, which only becomes less distracting when Foster shows up with a sparse thatch that\u2019s even worse. (Seriously, why is it that movie budgets so often don\u2019t stretch to decent wigs?) But Jim has thoughts on her hair, instructing her to grow it (\u201cNobody wants to see a butch girl fight\u201d), and putting her in a pastel pink satin robe and shorts for her first pro fight. But those braided cornrows when she switches to blonde? Girl, no.<\/p>\n \n\tIf Christy, who appears to have grown up as what used to be called a \u201ctomboy,\u201d feels any discomfort about this forced makeover, Sweeney doesn\u2019t show it. Instead, the character is a frustrating mix of passivity and mouthiness, coming off cocky in the ring and at press conferences, where she occasionally drops lesbian epithets about her opponents.<\/p>\n \n\tLater in the film, Christy\u2019s training partner and erstwhile opponent Lisa Holewyne (Katy O\u2019Bryan) calls her out on the forced nature of her tough-girl bravado. \u201cYou make it real easy for people to dislike you,\u201d she tells her. Sadly, that\u2019s true also for the audience.<\/p>\n \n\tWhen she\u2019s not concussing other women in the ring, Christy is busy correcting reporters who assume her boxing success makes her a trailblazing feminist. Instead, she plays up the happy wife-and-homemaker angle. That makes her a malleable figure paired with a manipulative man, and while that scenario is the basis of much domestic abuse, there\u2019s a nagging lack of nuance in Sweeney\u2019s characterization.<\/p>\n \n\tMich\u00f4d stages most of the matches in slick but perfunctory style, only giving us a real sense of Christy\u2019s tenacity when she goes up against what seems like her first well-matched opponent, Irish fighter Deirdre Gogarty. That fight, and a grueling faceoff against boxing dynastic royalty Laila Ali, are the rare times when tension is allowed to build in the ring. Generally, though, there\u2019s not a lot of poetry in the fight scenes, despite Mich\u00f4d mixing in ecclesiastical choral music with Antony Partos\u2019 score.<\/p>\n \n\tThe development of Christy\u2019s relationship with Jim as he goes from coach to lover to controlling husband without much evidence of real feeling between them is strictly by-the-numbers. But when he starts retaliating to her criticisms with violence, the movie turns darker, veering into territory more characteristic of Mich\u00f4d\u2019s work.<\/p>\n \n\tSweeney ably taps into the pathos of those scenes, but she\u2019s most affecting in her stoicism when others like Rosie or one of her ringside support team, Big Jeff (Bryan Hibbard), offer to help get Christy out of what\u2019s clearly an unendurable situation. <\/p>\n \n\tThere\u2019s also a terrific scene between Sweeney and Wever in which, during a birthday visit from Christy\u2019s family, she takes Joyce outside to talk about her fear of Jim\u2019s anger and her uneasiness about sexually explicit videos and photos he insists on taking of her. Having swallowed Jim\u2019s charms hook, line and sinker, Joyce shoots her daughter a pitying look and says, \u201cOh Christy, you sound crazy,\u201d reprimanding her for trash-talking her husband.<\/p>\n \n\tJim\u2019s reaction when Christy does finally summon the courage to leave is a shocking jolt of violence that ups the intensity and will undoubtedly be the movie\u2019s most talked-about moment. But as horrifying as it is, it\u2019s almost too little too late in a film that remains stubbornly unaffecting.<\/p>\n \n\tWhile Sweeney deserves credit for her physical transformation, I wish I had found Christy a little more interesting, with more spark of her own. Likewise Foster, who has played variations on this role too many times to be as chilling as the filmmakers no doubt intend.<\/p>\n \n\tThe movie\u2019s secret weapon is Wever, not softening Joyce\u2019s judgmental coldness even when her daughter has been almost killed. O\u2019Brian also impresses, she and Hibbard both injecting welcome notes of warmth and tenderness. But the livewire performance that sparks up the movie just as it\u2019s starting to flatten is Chad Coleman as a hilarious Don King, chortling away even as he\u2019s making it clear he\u2019s a shrewd businessman with no time for amateurs or fools.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Starting with his breakthrough feature, the simmering Australian crime family saga Animal Kingdom, David Mich\u00f4d has leaned frequently into dark material. There\u2019s grit but also lugubriousness in Christy, an inspirational sports movie that morphs in somewhat ungainly style into an unflinching depiction of domestic violence. It\u2019s only when that ugliness creeps in that the director<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":19481,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[11942,3618,999,11941,7906,4234],"class_list":{"0":"post-19480","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-biodrama","9":"tag-boxing","10":"tag-david","11":"tag-michods","12":"tag-sweeney","13":"tag-sydney"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19480","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19480"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19480\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/19481"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19480"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19480"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19480"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
\n\t<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
Release date<\/strong>: Friday, Nov. 7
Cast<\/strong>: Sydney Sweeney, Ben Foster, Merritt Wever, Katy O\u2019Brian, Ethan Embry, Jess Gabor, Chad Coleman, Bryan Hibbard, Tony Cavalero, Gilbert Cruz, Bill Kelly
Director<\/strong>: David Mich\u00f4d
Screenwriters<\/strong>: Mirrah Foulkes, David Mich\u00f4d
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t2 hours 15 minutes\t\t\t<\/span>\n\t\t<\/p>\n