Tragedy stalks a wrestling family

 When I was a kid, I'd occasionally watch professional wrestling. But it never held my interest for long because it was a) grotesque b) staged and c) melodramatic. 

  Also, my mother would sometimes insist on a channel change. 

  "Why is that 'junk' blaring on the TV? Read a book.”

  The Iron Claw, a movie set in the world of professional wrestling, takes place in the 1970s and 1980s, long after I had even a minimal interest in pro wrestling. Thankfully director Sean Durkin (Marcy May Marlene) isn't only preaching to the pro-wrestling choir. 

  Durkins brings plenty of indie spirit to the story of the Von Erich family, a fabled bunch of professional wrestlers. He gives the movie focus by concentrating on the father/son relationship between Kevin Von Erich (an almost unrecognizable Zac Efron) and his tyrannical father (Holt McCallany).

    Kevin's three brothers (Harris Dickinson, Jeremy Allen White, and Stanley Simons) play important roles in creating the pressured environment in which these young men struggle toward maturity.

    All of the brothers wrestle. Even Simons's Mike, who prefers music and plays in a band, picks up the wrestling shield when others have fallen.

    Efron excels as Kevin, who for a time, is passed over in the family's quest to capture a championship belt. Nothing drives McCallany's Fritz, who wrestled during the 1960s, more than being top dog.  Fritz loves his kids but he has a touch of the Great Santini in him. He pushes, goads, and insists that the brothers meet his standards of toughness.

    The brothers mostly defer to Dad's judgments, and the relationships between the siblings are depicted as competitive yet caring.

    Kevin broods about being passed over in favor his brothers before getting his shot at the big time, but he doesn't undermine them. Although these young men have been taught to regard themselves as members of a family business, we get to know each of them as individuals.

   Dickinson's Davis seems like the only brother who's having fun in the ring. He’s the guy for whom things come easily. Kevin sweats; Davis glides.

  White's Kerry is infected by intensity, a counterpoint to Mike’s conflicted nature.

   As he tells the story of the Von Erich tribe, Durkin finds dark currents. The family believes it has been cursed. The oldest Von Erich brother died when he was a child. Since then, the brothers have been looking over their shoulders for the shadow of the reaper.

       Questions of danger loom because of injuries, accidents, and a father's unremitting mind-set, which he justifies as necessary if his sons are to achieve the goal he imposes on them. He even ranks his sons, although he acknowledges that the rankings can change according to performance.

   Softer moments occur when Kevin falls for the woman (Lily James) who will become his wife, the first glimmer that some of life's rewards might not require climbing into the ring or tossing someone out of it.

    If you're looking for a movie full of sports triumphs, The Iron Claw may disappoint. You'll more likely remember the movie as the tragic story of a family that found heartbreak in its single-minded pursuit of ring renown. 

   If you research the Von Erichs, you'll learn that Durkin omitted mention of Chris, a sixth son. Maybe purists will care. I wondered about it, but moved on.

   I don't want to oversell The Iron Claw, but there's good reason to acknowledge its strengths, including Efron's performance.  He gives the movie its wounded soul. 

   Kevin may not be the best of the Von Erich wrestlers, but he's sincere and eventually he learns that living under dictatorial rule isn't satisfying -- even if the dictator happens to be your father.

 

Bob's Cinema Diary: 9/17/20 -- 'Blackbird' and 'The Nest'

The Nest

Director Sean Durkin returns to the screen after a long hiatus. His last movie was  2011's Martha Marcy May Marlene. With The Nest, Durkin travels back to the 1980s for a look at a marriage struggling to survive the upheaval of a transatlantic move. Jude Law  (as Rory) and Carrie Coon (as Allison) star as a husband and wife who have fallen off the same page even before they move to London. She loves their suburban life in the US. He’s too ambitious to be content. She runs a riding school: He's a commodities trader. Rory and Allison have two kids: a daughter (Oona Roche) from Allison's previous marriage and a son (Charlie Shotwell) from the couple's current marriage. Not only does Rory drag his family across the ocean, he soon runs out of funds. He vastly overestimates his ability to persuade his London boss (Michael Culkin) to merge his company with an American firm, a development that ensures that Rory won't be able to  afford the Surrey estate he impulsively rented for the family. Late in the movie, a taxi driver asks Rory what he does for a living. "I pretend to be rich,'' says Rory, who by this time has entered a state of dejected realization: The rungs on the social ladder he's climbing have begun to collapse. As the horse-loving Allison, Coon embodies the emotional volatility of an '80s woman who doesn't always listen to her better judgment. Initially charming, Rory refuses to acknowledge his limitations and, in Law's hands, reaches a state of hollowed-out desperation. Durkin, who has no interest in feel-good sentiment, courageously brings his movie to a conclusion marked as much by exhaustion and defeat as by anything that might be called reconciliation. 

Blackbird

There are few more familiar dramatic conceits than this:  A family gathers for a special occasion only to have soul-wrenching secrets revealed. Blackbird follows such a traditional map but adds a disturbing twist. Mom (Susan Sarandon) is dying of ALS. In response, Sarandon's Lily has decided to end her life. She wants to see her family one more time before drinking the lethal concoction that will enable her to avoid a nightmarish end to an otherwise fulfilling life. As the story unfolds, director Roger Michell introduces us to Lily's family: daughters played by Kate Winslet and Mia Wasikowska and a husband portrayed by an underutilized Sam Neill. Winslet's Jennifer arrives at Lily’s seaside home with her husband (Rainn Wilson) and teenage son (Anson Boon). Lindsay Duncan turns up as Lily's best friend.  Christian Torpe's screenplay boasts finely wrought moments that are well-executed by a fine cast, tense encounters between the sisters, for example. But the screenplay adds a few reveals too many and even a cast this strong can't always compensate for a lack of dramatic crackle. At the same time, Michell eventually finds the emotional power and the deep sadness that accompanies Lily's decision; just because it's the right choice for her doesn't make its irrevocability any less harrowing.

She escapes a cult -- or does she?

Martha Marcy May Marlene is a study in tension, dread and carefully built anxiety.

Ever since I heard it, I've had trouble remembering the title of Martha Marcy May Marlene. The movie? That's another story. Director Sean Durkin's debut feature brims with enough quiet tension to make it one of the year's most memorable movies.

Durkin, who also wrote the screenplay, tells the story of a young woman (Elizabeth Olsen) who escapes from a rural cult in upstate New York, but can't entirely shake off the experience.

On a deeper level, Martha Marcy May Marlene is a creepy mediation on the darker corners of identity. Just as Martha seems to juggle many identities -- some of her own choosing, some not -- the film, too, comes across as a kind of mixed tape, finding its roots in both horror and psychological drama, genres that often are at their best when merged.

Olsen plays Martha, a young woman who, having fled a cult, shows up at the home of her sister Lucy (Sarah Paulson). It's immediately clear that Martha's presence will elevate tensions between Lucy and her architect husband (Hugh Dancy). Lucy feels responsible for her younger sister, even though she hasn't seen her in a couple of years.

This kind of movie -- ambiguous and haunting -- puts tremendous pressure on its lead actress, and Olsen handles it well. On one hand, we believe that she's had her fill of cult life; on the other, it's clear that Martha's life on the farm has toppled her ideas about personal boundaries and social convention. At one point, Martha pops into bed with her sister and her husband while they're making love. We eventually learn that in the cult, women are initiated by being drugged and raped by the cult's charismatic leader (John Hawkes).

Martha's constantly flashing back to her experiences in the cult. We know enough about other cults -- the Manson family, for example -- to fear that terrible violence lurks among cult members who are committed to defending their isolated way of life, which offers an indigestible mix of puritanical rigor (the man and women eat separately) and perversion (the women are offered to the cult leader as if they were sacrifices to an earthly god).

Durkin leaves plenty of blanks for us to fill in. We speculate that Martha joined this cult because she felt displaced, and that, for a time, the cult provided her with a safe heaven, as well as with a sense of power.

We also wonder whether Martha is strong enough to escape the influences of Hawkes' Patrick, who knows how to cast a wicked spell. He keeps telling Martha that she's "a teacher and a leader," someone special.

Durkin builds additional tension by forcing us to wonder when the cult members will follow Martha -- who they call Marcy May -- into her sister's suburban home, which represents a lifestyle Martha seems to find as off-putting as that of the cult.

Durkin purposefully keeps us off balance: At times, we're not sure whether we're in the present or re-living a piece of Martha's past. This approach makes sense because Martha may not be sure, either, and the movie benefits from its unhinged sense of creepiness.

Martha never tells Lucy where she's been, and it strains credibility to think that Lucy waits until the picture nearly has concluded to suggest that Martha seek professional help.

But Durkin's ability to sustain a sense of dread more than compensates for a few plot holes, and Martha Marcy May Marlene stands as one of the year's more intriguing pictures, a portrait of a self-contained world that's suffocating the spirit of a young woman who doesn't know (and maybe never will) how she fits into the general scheme of things.