Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
9/1/07
Since being blown away by
his little-seen debut feature Deterrence back in 1999, I've been
fascinated by the career of film critic-turned-director Rod Lurie.
He's a real oddity in our pre-sold movie era: a director interested
primarily in stories about politics and ethics. While it's brought
him his largest audience and greatest popular acclaim, his fixation on
getting a woman into the White House got him mired in the preachy, wonkish
narratives of The Contender and the TV series Commander in Chief.
But I loved his passionately felt 2001 prison thriller The Last Castle.
Alas, it flopped, and it's taken another six years for him to direct his
fourth feature, the boxing-flavored newspaper drama Resurrecting the
Champ. Like his other films, it wears its' heart on its' sleeve.
Unlike them, its' lens pans down below the concerns of Presidents and Generals
to tell a story about the day-to-day battles we fight between facing the
truth and hiding behind lies. It's a steady, deliberate film filled
with good performances and it packs a surprising emotional punch.
Erik Kernan Jr. (Josh Hartnett)
coasts on his name as the son of a famous sportscaster, writing mediocre
articles for a Denver newspaper edited by the disapproving Metz (Alan Alda).
Separated from his wife Joyce (Kathryn Morris), Erik is not above inventing
tall tales about his great career to impress his son Teddy (Dakota Goyo).
But what he really wants is to live some of those ambitions, and sees a
chance to move up when he gets an interview with magazine editor Whitley
(David Paymer). Days before, he bumped into a homeless man (Samuel
L. Jackson) who claimed to be a great 50's boxer named Bob Satterfield,
and when Whitley's not interested in any of his mundane story ideas, Erik
pitches him an article about the man who calls himself “The Champ”.
Everyone tells Erik that Satterfield died 20 years ago, but he gets a research
assistant (Rachel Nichols) to start digging up info on him, and everything
he sees seems to back up The Champ's story. Slipping him a few dollars
and buying a lot of beers keeps Champ coming back to talk, but it takes
a lot of effort to get him to cooperate with the story. He finally
does, and a brilliant cover story called “Resurrecting the Champ” results.
Now Erik's a star and offers start to pour in, including an on-air job
from Showtime network executive Andrea Flak (Terri Hatcher). The
only problem? A call from old school boxing expert Epstein (Peter
Coyote), who insists that Satterfield really is dead.
Resurrecting the Champ
is based on a series of late-90's L.A. Times articles by J.R. Moehringer,
who was persuaded by a homeless man that he really was Bob Satterfield.
Changing a few names to take liberties with the innocent (and the guilty),
Lurie and his writers Michael Bortman and Allison Burnett take the tale
as an opportunity to question the role lies play in our day-to-day existence.
Sure, not many of us are going by someone else's name, but don't we all
grease the wheels of workplace advancement and try to get our loved ones
to buy into our own distorted self-image with the occasional fib?
What Erik learns is that each lie moves us farther away from the people
around us, maybe even finally as far away from love and intimacy as The
Champ has found himself.
The film also explores how,
while we react to exposed frauds with outrage, Truth is no longer the media's
business. Hatcher, whose two bravura scenes are the kind of thing
that get more established actresses Oscar nominations, has a great, boozy
speech about how Showtime (and by extension, all of the media) is in the
business of using the illusion of journalism to give everyone an excuse
to feel OK about being entertained. And so, like Erik's trusting
son, many reporters now just decide whose story they want to believe and
simply pass along whatever they say (hey, maybe Lurie IS still being political!).
To drive the point home, Lurie allows the film and his actors to linger
on the real emotional consequences of letting people down. In most
movies, shame and forgiveness are plot point gears that grind so predictably
that they are barely expressed other than in bursts of “Oh, no, I've been
found out!” and “Well, the audience wants us to get along, so I guess I
forgive you.” The dynamics between The Champ and Erik and Erik and
his son are more realistic than we generally see, particularly in a crushing
scene where every lie Erik's ever told seems to come back at once at Teddy's
elementary school Career Day.
The acting is strong across
the board. Jackson is really out on a ledge: beneath some pretty
disturbing old age makeup and an outrageously gone-to-seed wig, he speaks
in a diseased rasp that takes some getting used to. He's not the
wacky or wise homeless man we're used to seeing in the movies, but instead
has edges of real danger and insanity to him that make the character seem
authentic, while the actor manages to keep him grounded enough to avoid
becoming a caricature of Scary Homeless Guy. Hartnett, his online
pinup boy days behind him, is maturing into a really solid actor, and he
nails both Erik's casual, lazy ambition and the shame he feels when his
deeds come home to roost. Goyo's no Olivier (cut the kid some slack,
he just turned 8!), but he's got a great “Say it ain't so, Daddy” look
to him and he and Hartnett enjoy solid father-son chemistry. Morris
takes the standard Judgmental Wife role and manages to emerge as the moral
compass most movies wish that character was. Alda and Paymer could
play, respectively, their hard-nosed and desperately trustful editors in
their sleep, but they're still welcome presences. Hatcher, Nichols,
Coyote and Harry Lennix as Satterfield's son, make the most of their few
scenes.
Bortman and Burnett's screenplay
uses the story to explore lots of different themes but never loses the
through line of the story and manages to dot its' 'I''s and cross its'
'T''s impressively. During the investigative phase, it plays nice
tricks to keep us from asking obvious “Well, why don't you check...” questions,
then pulls the rug out from under us just as skillfully. It's such
a great story: who wouldn't want it to be true?
But you can't make something
true by wanting it, and having wanted something doesn't make what you do
to get it right. I sometimes wonder if we as a country have stopped
thinking of truth as valuable and now see it only as an obstacle to ambition.
Resurrecting The Champ, an intriguing ethics lesson from a unique
and distinctive filmmaker, shares those concerns but also, in its' gut,
refuses to cave to cynicism and still asks how we can all be better people.
Who knows, by the time Rod Lurie makes his next movie, there might even
be a woman in the White House. And how good would his movies be then?!? |
