MOVIE REVIEW: ‘Southpaw’ has amazing acting

ANALYSIS/OPINION

’Southpaw” is a movie about a professional boxer who loses everything and then regains his glory.

Fittingly, for a movie about a professional fighter, it is blunt, bruising and brazenly manipulative. Watching this film, which on two separate occasions builds sympathy for supporting characters only to kill them off in order to spur the protagonist on his personal journey, often feels like the emotional equivalent of being battered and beaten in the ring: It pushes you around, finds your weak points and lands its punches accordingly.

That its manipulations are so obvious does not make them very much less effective.

The movie makes its intentions clear the moment it reveals the name of its fist-flinging protagonist: Billy Hope, which is worthy of an eye roll or three. A better choice, I suppose, than the likely alternative: Jack Redemption.

Hope is played by Jake Gyllenhaal. Mr. Gyllenhaal, normally a cerebral actor with a quiet streak, brings an unexpected physicality to the role. He’s bulked up and thoroughly ripped, his torso tattooed with garish slogans. With longer hair and a bit of makeup, he could be a Juggalo, or the next Joker.

Mr. Gyllenhaal’s physical transformation displays an impressive commitment to the part, but it’s not always totally convincing. Sure, he mumbles his lines and angrily flips tables, but there’s a searching intelligence that he can’t quite hide. Even with his bulging biceps and rippling abs, there are moments when he comes across a bit too much like a skinny geek in a muscle suit.

When we first meet Hope, he’s a wealthy championship fighter who has never lost a bout, sitting in a locker room preparing for a big fight. He goes into the ring and, after a bit of difficulty, emerges bloody but victorious. But his wife Maureen (Rachel McAdams, who makes the most of too little screen time) has concerns about his trajectory.

They have a young daughter, Leila (Oona Laurence), who wears glasses and draws with crayons and is generally cute in all the ways that movies require a protagonist’s daughter to be cute. How long can he keep up his brutal lifestyle, Maureen wonders. Might the intensity of his boxing career tear him away from his family and all that he loves?

Maureen’s questions aren’t really questions so much as a kind of executive summary of where the rest of the movie is going. After tragedy strikes, Hope devolves into a state of deep, showy brokenness: He rages, dramatically and cinematically, to himself, eventually smashing up his car and head-butting a referee in a fight. Before long, he’s lost his home, his family and, after a suspension, his ability to box professionally.

Hope’s melodramatic breakdown is the weakest part of the film, and it’s not entirely believable emotionally or narratively. That’s par for the course for screenwriter Kurt Sutter, the mastermind behind the brutal TV biker drama “Sons of Anarchy,” which similarly followed successful violent men through the trenches of emotional turmoil.

But Mr. Sutter also can be a gifted writer, especially when he lowers the emotional temperature, and he follows Hope’s bottoming out with the movie’s best stretch, in which the disgraced boxer heads to a working-class New York gym to train with an old fight coach named Tick Willis.

Willis is played with disarming humanity by the great Forest Whitaker, and the handful of scenes in which he and Hope rap about life, tragedy, boxing and personal responsibility have the rich texture of real human life and conversation — or something like it. Mr. Whitaker is the vehicle for Hope’s redemption — and also the movie’s.

I was about to give up on the film before Mr. Whitaker appeared, but his presence puts the story back on track in its later rounds.

“Southpaw” is no knockout, but thanks to the calming presence of Mr. Whitaker — along with some increasingly surefooted direction by Antoine Fuqua (“Training Day,” “The Equalizer”) — it still comes out a winner.

 

TITLE: “Southpaw”

CREDITS: Directed by Antoine Fuqua; screenplay by Kurt Sutter

RATING: R for language, violence

RUNNING TIME: 123 minutes

MAXIMUM RATING: FOUR STARS