June 2- 8, 2005

movies

Cinderfella

TAKING A HIT: Russell Crowe (left) feels the pain.

There's more schlock than sock in this nostalgic boxing yarn.

by Shaun Brady

Sooner or later, every director gets around to his boxing picture. Last year Clint Eastwood used his to delve into the real pain underlying the ambition and struggle that the genre typically celebrates. Now Ron Howard shakes Clint's mud off his boots and treads straight up the middle road, turning in as archetypal a fight flick as can be imagined.

The comparison is enlightening beyond the obvious parallels: Both men share affinities for Hollywood's golden age. Eastwood is a product of that time, and he may be the one filmmaker still employing the era's straightforward, understated style. Million Dollar Baby provides a glimpse of how films would look had the factory-style studios stayed open for the last 40 years, and its oft-discussed darkness drains the screen of color to achieve a wartime Warner Bros. noir world.

Howard takes a different lesson from the period, and an inherently dishonest one. Where Eastwood draws inspiration from the aesthetics of postwar cinema, Howard reaches back to the naive optimism of a decade earlier. Depression-era Hollywood is generally celebrated as the heyday of escapist fare, and Cinderella Man's sepia-tinged images pine nostalgically for a more innocent time. The fact that this time never existed outside of a movie palace never intrudes on Howard's simplistic worldview.

Russell Crowe stars as James J. Braddock, a boxer whose improbable comeback earned him the titular sobriquet from Damon Runyon. Crowe, for all his offscreen scrapes, has a habit of playing puppy dogs, and his Braddock is another in a long line of good-hearted stoics. There's a desperation in his eyes that shows evidence of a struggle the screenplay never provides, that of a man whose intelligence is not equal to his overwhelming situation. Renée Zellweger does a plucky, little-goil-voiced schtick as Braddock's wife (Jean Arthur could take her in one round), and Paul Giamatti returns to comic relief status as trainer/manager Joe Gould.

Screenwriter Akiva Goldsman, also returning from A Beautiful Mind, has never shown any qualms about discarding a fact where a cliche is more convenient, and smoothing away jagged edges so his audience can remain blissfully unchallenged. The most obvious example here is Paddy Considine's turn as a friend of Braddock's whose (largely offscreen) activism is the only acknowledgment of the story's political implications, but whose real purpose is his tear-jerking death. Apparently none of Braddock's real-life acquaintances were considerate enough to provide Goldsman with such an opportunity.

The only surprising element of Cinderella Man is that it took Howard this long; the boxer overcoming adversity seems a far more obvious Oscar grab than the delusional mathematician. The fight sequences themselves are undeniably thrilling, but first year film students could put together a compelling boxing match and Howard draws wholly on the techniques of his predecessors. What happens in between is so simplified that it may have even the most undemanding of audiences checking their watches. It's hard to care about the triumph of the human spirit when the spirit won't stop triumphing long enough to allow for real adversity.

Cinderella Man Directed by Ron Howard A Universal release Opens Friday at area theaters