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Lord of the Ring
James J. Braddock's good life makes a great film.
by John Podhoretz
5/28/2005 12:03:00 AM, Volume 010, Issue 36
CINDERELLA MAN is the sort of movie Hollywood gave up on long ago. It's a sentimental period piece about working-class folk who speak in dese-dem-dose accents--a mother who takes in sewing, a father who works down by the docks, and three kids who fear being sent away because there's not enough money to feed all five family members. There's even a lovable parish priest.
Most striking, Cinderella Man is a hagiographic portrait of a real-life personality who can't possibly have been as saintly as he is depicted onscreen. The fact that our hero is a boxer, engaged in a punishing sport that involves him beating on other men and getting beaten in return, never becomes the occasion for cheap pop psychologizing. Pugilism is our hero's job, not his life, and when he's done with a bout he returns home to the wife and kids. He does nothing--nothing--wrong, and is never less than totally virtuous. He is a wonderful father, a caring husband, and a citizen so upright that he returns to the state of New Jersey the $317 he received in welfare payments during the period when he was out of work.
The filmmaking team responsible for Cinderella Man--director Ron Howard, co-screenwriter Akiva Goldsman, and star Russell Crowe--also made the wonderful Oscar-winning biographical film A Beautiful Mind. They tricked up that true-life tale by filming the paranoid delusions of its schizophrenic protagonist as though they were really happening, only later revealing that much of what we had been watching in the film's first ...
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