'Christy' Review: Excellent Performances Can't Save This Average Sports Biopic
Sydney Sweeney and Ben Foster are spectacular in David Michôd’s CHRISTY, but that’s about all this TEDIOUSLY generic sports-biopic has going for it.
Once Michael Gracey’s Better Man showed us how to reinvent the genre through the power of brazen ambition and CG-chimpanzees, there was no going back to the traditional Oscar-bait biopic. At least, so I had hoped. By the time I had watched parodies such as Eric Appel’s Weird: The Al Yankovic Story and Jake Kasdan’s Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story twice over, I couldn’t unsee the formula being copied and pasted into nearly every biopic I watched, whether that be Bohemian Rhapsody or the recent Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere. Evidently falling into the pre-Better Man camp of your average biopic, David Michôd’s Christy, based on the life story of boxer Christy Martin (played by Sydney Sweeney), is another cookie-cutter biopic for an icon whose story deserves better.
After making an impression with his 2010 Sundance award-winning debut, Animal Kingdom, Michôd always had promise as a director, but, unfortunately, he hasn’t been able to outdo himself since then. I thought The Rover was a meandering Mad Max rip-off with an excellent score, War Machine was flat-out dumb (not in the fun way), and the Shakespeare dork in me found The King to be a bastardization of everything that made the Henriad so good. It’s safe to say that I’m not necessarily a fan of Michôd, but he doesn’t do anything in Christy to win me over, either. He can move a camera, sure, but it’s almost a brass-balled choice to mark every time jump with an era-appropriate needle drop; it feels as if even Michôd knows how clichéd Christy is.
You’ve seen Christy’s screenplay a thousand times before, which is a shame considering how riveting Martin’s story actually is. Humble beginnings, disapproving parents (reducing Merritt Wever to a cartoon character is a cardinal sin, by the way), the hard times, the drugs, the comeback story, the “and they all lived happily ever after” text before the credits — it’s about as “rinse and repeat” as they come. By the time Christy’s dad pounded his fist on the dinner table and shouted, “Enough!”, I knew exactly what kind of movie I was in for. The closest Christy comes to being a compelling narrative is mostly in its back half, narrowing in on Christy’s transactional relationship with her abusive husband, Jim Martin (Ben Foster). Somewhere in Christy is an incredible story to tell regarding Christy’s toxic marriage to Jim, and it’s an important story regarding Martin’s status as an advocate for domestic violence, but Michôd is asleep at the wheel at nearly every step.
Aside from everything else that makes Christy an unbearably bland viewing experience, the cast is the only thing that saves this movie from being completely unwatchable. Sydney Sweeney is the obvious highlight as Martin, but her raucous energy as “The Coal Miner’s Daughter” feels contained within boxing scenes that run far too short. Ben Foster is as sleazy and douchey as ever as Jim Martin, but the combover and added weight seem more like choices to earn a Best Supporting Actor nod than anything else. The dynamic between Sweeney and Foster is exceptionally stomach-churning, but by the time their relationship explodes, I had already checked out of the movie. In the right hands, this cast would’ve worked wonders to tell Martin’s story, but the narrative strength just isn’t there.
Maybe I’ve become jaded by these types of biopics, but I could see through nearly every choice that Michôd and co-writer Mirrah Foulkes threw my way. I cannot stress enough how interesting Christy Martin’s story actually is, but it’s a shame that it’s told in the most uninteresting way possible. Sweeney’s physicality and increased torturedness work to make a capable silhouette of Christy Martin, but the presentation reads less like a personalized story and more like the “Personal Life” section on Wikipedia. There are a few scenes in the ring that last longer than two minutes, but they’re shot with the voracity of a turtle. Most of the actual boxing is relegated to montages of Christy knocking opponents out, with Christy’s motivations as a boxer never going further than “because she’s good at it”. For a story about a middleweight boxer, Christy’s narrative feels entirely weightless.
Given David Michôd’s less-than-stellar track record, I can’t say I’m surprised at Christy’s mediocrity, but somehow I’m still disappointed. Considering Christy was put into development in the pre-Better Man era, it’s only reasonable that the leftover residue from your traditional biopic will dwindle with time before dying out completely. In the new age of Rocketman, Better Man, and Oppenheimer, the time has officially come for the biopics of old to phase out of existence forever, with hopefully something fresh and new emerging in their place. Let’s not be too hasty in our assumptions, though, because the storm cloud that is Antoine Fuqua’s Michael Jackson biopic (which will either be four hours long or split into two parts, based on reports) threatens to either revitalize the Oscar-bait biopic or kill it for good.