When Robert De Niro radically transformed his body to play the boxer Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull, it meant he was serious about his craft, and reshaped our understanding of authenticity in acting. What does it mean that Sydney Sweeney transformed hers, gaining an easily googleable quantity of pounds of muscle mass, to play the boxer Christy Martin (née Salters) in Christy?
It means something different than it meant when De Niro did it, and something more: For reasons bigger than Sweeney, it says something about her as a celebrity as well as an artist. At the moment Hollywood’s most conventionally attractive – I intend for the superlative to modify the adverb, not the adjective – leading lady, classic blonde bombshell Sweeney is a culture-war symbol, whose good genes have seen her claimed by the right as an icon of trad femininity, and suspect by the left for her cool-girl indulgence of antiwoke signifiers – even as mean-spirited commentary from regressive chuds about her Christy weight gain inspired her to celebrate her workout routine in an “epic clapback.” Christy – which Sweeney produced as well as stars in – is about a woman who self-actualized through combat sports, a closeted lesbian who struggled to break free of an abusive marriage and heteronormalized public image; it’s a story of both literal and figurative empowerment that also speaks to ongoing shifts in public perceptions of women’s health, in the growing movement to exercise to get strong, not skinny, to fuel unapologetically with high-protein diets. As an awards-bait biopic, Christy is basically solid; as another chapter in the star text of a soon-to-be-28-year-old woman basically no one on the internet can ever be normal about, it’s interesting – and also, given the entrepreneurial Sweeney’s social-media savvy, quite a canny bit of positioning.
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West Virginian Martin was nicknamed “The Coal Miner’s Daughter” after Loretta Lynn’s signature tune and the Oscar-winning (hmm…) Sissy Spacek biopic it inspired, and her life unfolded like a country song. As the film begins, Christy Salters is a sporty college student with a tomboyish shag haircut, a semi-secret girlfriend, and a disapproving mother. (As Joyce Salters, Merritt Wever, who is beginning to look like the great Shirley Knight, is much more subtle than Allison Janney’s campy turn in I, Tonya; she has a gently spoken sweetness that makes her love feel all the more coldly withheld.) When she discovers her vocation in boxing, Christy begins climbing the lower rungs of a ladder that doesn’t really exist yet, winning over sparring partners only by knocking them out, and earning a measure of respect from her initially reluctant trainer, Jim Martin (Ben Foster, one of our go-to Bald Wig Skeezes, with a sleepy and malevolent patriarchal La-Z-Boy lean-back even when standing). Roused to dream by Christy’s raw talent, Jim promises to groom her for greatness, as it were, and soon marries his meal ticket; what she marries is the gatekeeper of her own dreams, who in addition to controlling her training, also controls her diet, her career, her finances, and her access to her family and friends.
The coach-athlete relationship, in which an older and more seasoned figure controls access to the thing a younger person wants most in the world, is fraught with imbalances of experience, wisdom, and power, and crossed by often-confusing currents of admiration, jealousy, and attraction in both directions. (Last year’s Julie Keeps Quiet handled the abuse that can arise from this relationship very well.) Christy manages the balance of encouragement and threat very well initially, as Jim speaks frequently and perhaps even genuinely about Christy’s potential, chasing every tender compliment with belittlement which she accepts as the tough love she needs in order to be truly ready for the big fight, which she finally gets after her bouts bring her to the attraction of legendary promoter Don King (Chad L. Coleman).
All catchphrases and jolly menace, the film’s King is too close to comic relief, especially opposite the wormy Foster – though King, who exploited generations of fighters and killed at least two people, is surely the more evil man. The film is perhaps trying something like Star 80, in which the small-time pimp Paul Snider loses his trophy wife, Dorothy Stratten, to the imperial playboy Hugh Hefner. But Christy is invested in its star’s inspiring true story, rather than dwelling in the abyss of pathological masculinity inhabited by Eric Roberts for his all-timer performance in Bob Fosse’s film.
During Martin’s 90s heyday, Christy is decked out in shoulder-padded 90s floral-print dresses and poodle perm, cast by Jim as domestic goddess. The BMW her pay-per-view bouts bought is pink, to match the robe and trunks he picked out for her. She taunts her opponents with homophobic invective (one of them is played by Katy O’Brian, the swole and enthralling temptress of Love Lies Bleeding, whose casting arguably constitutes a spoiler), and takes every opportunity to proclaim that, despite her status as a women’s sports pioneer, she is no feminist. But the balance of power in the relationship shifts definitively as the boom times fade and Martin struggles for fights, wearing heavy clothes for the weigh-in before a lucrative but humiliating defeat to the bigger and stronger Laila Ali; drugs, sex tapes and other forms of domestic surveillance give way to physical abuse at first inside and then out of the ring, escalating to stalking, revenge porn, and eventually the attempted murder for which Jim Martin remains imprisoned.
Director David Michôd, who deploys an ominous and overemphatic drone score and strategically withholding camera position for the marital violence, is more at home with domestic psychodrama than in the ring, where the boxing too often flies by in knockout montages. There’s little of the atmosphere of a big fight, the sense of occasion and the sustained, momentous focus that a boxer brings into the arena; likewise there’s too few the archival textures, like the evolving grammar of 90s cable sports, which would have widened the scope of Martin’s story by grounding Martin’s many-layered life against the evolving backdrop of turn-of-the-century America – a necessity in a resourcefully budgeted film that makes the most of its wigs, clothes, and interior décor.
Sweeney’s hair ages over the course of the film but her face doesn’t, which is fine, given that the 20-plus year time span of the film is almost as long as her life so far. She’s serviceably steely and wide-eyed out of the ring, but it’s in the fights that she comes to life, seemingly thrilled with the physical demands of the role, meeting each opponent with an anticipatory head-cock or shoulder shimmy, flying at them at the bell, and raising her arms in triumph after Martin’s many victories, mugging for the camera, leaping up onto the ropes to work the crowd in displays of unbridled, almost girlish enthusiasm and exultant swagger. The endorphins are pumping through her bloodstream.
