Southpaw

Synopsis: Pro-boxer Billy Hope (Jake Gyllenhaal) is on top of the world  when he loses his wife (Rachel McAdams) in a tragic accident and his daughter (Oona Laurence) is taken away from him by child protection services. Only trainer Tick Willis (Forest Whitaker) can get his life back on track.

Surprisingly, given its essential thuggery, from Robert Wise’s The Set-Up to Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull to David O. Russell’s The Fighter boxing has given us some remarkably good films. I haven’t developed a thesis about it but I suspect that it’s because its elemental nature connects us to our brute origins in a time when life literally was a jungle. The jungle has been socialized, the battle turned into entertainment and  the prize is money but at its psychic core is still a kill-or-be-killed struggle to survive. In the hands of good film-makers this is powerful stuff.

Antoine Fuqua’s film speaks to this territory and when it sticks to it is a real contender. When it overlays the elemental with the sentimental it turns into formulaic sludge. But that’s the kind of films that Fuqua makes – slick, testosterone-driven multiplex packages (his most recent was The Equalizer about a vigilante hardware store employee, his best-known is Training Day, about a rogue cop, both characters played by Denzel Washington). Southpaw fits the mold. Indeed the film is at its strongest when focussing on the awesomely-ripped Gyllenhaal and his performance in the ring.

The fight sequences are superbly staged. Gyllenhaal is an actor on whom one can always rely for a committed performance and he doesn’t disappoint here as a man for whom boxing has been his way out of Hell’s Kitchen and (like his wife, well-played, if briefly so, by Rachel McAdams) his upbringing by the social welfare “system”. There’s pain and anger aplenty here, mollified for a while by his lavish lifestyle, but when she is killed in an incident that he partly brought on and which destroys that life, it only gets more intense.

Setting this all up takes about one-third of the running time with Billy finally arriving at rock-bottom. Then the story turns into a very familiar journey to redemption as he seeks out the crusty retired trainer (Clint Eastwood in Million Dollar Baby anyone?) who teaches him the Zen of boxing so that he can trounce the wicked opponent who stole his life and win back his cute bespectacled daughter on whom, of course, he dotes. Fuqua is so firmly set on the redemptive narrative path that this takes him merely two steps from charity match to title fight (is that even possible? one wonders) and he apparently doesn’t see any problem with putting the daughter backstage with her spunky Afro-American social worker so that they can watch Dad engage in a pugilistic bloodbath and cheer madly when he attains ultimate vindication.

Despite its templated structure when it’s good, Southpaw is compelling and there’s enough of that to recommend it (although if snapping necks and sprays of blood and spittle are not your thing you might want to consider other options). But most of all Gyllenhaal is outstanding in the lead. If you’re a fan you won’t want to miss his work here.

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