It is evermore the way of American life to think in terms of winners and losers, with no middle ground—even though that’s exactly where the vast majority of us dwell. The absurdity of such values reached an apex with a former First Lady’s advocacy of the principle “Be Best” as a supposed inspirational motto for youth. Not only was it ungrammatical and vague, it was illogical: How can everybody be the (there’s that missing article!) “best”?
Of course, there are plenty of people who really do believe that anything less than taking the Olympic gold constitutes failure. But there’s a difference between striving for excellence and the self-defeating effect of dismissing any actual result that’s less than an A+. (Yes, I realize Melania Trump’s campaign was ostensibly about cyberbullying and such. But could she have possibly chosen a more awkward, irrelevant, and confusing slogan to articulate that?)
The grueling and frequently unsuccessful effort required to reach the tippy-top of a particular field is probed in three new movies opening this Friday. Most prominent among them is The Iron Claw, a dramatization of travails amongst the Von Erich family, who were rumored—though it may also have been a means of generating publicity—to be “cursed” after a series of tragic events. But intentionally or not, Sean Durkin’s film makes clear that notion was hogwash. The only thing the Von Erichs were “cursed” by was a patriarch who demanded his sons achieve the pro sports glory he himself had been denied.
In various ways they crumbled under that pressure, so that only one of six sons is still alive today. (Admittedly, a first offspring died in a childhood accident, while for whatever legal or other reasons, the suicidal youngest is entirely omitted from this screen version, which opening text claims is only “inspired” by a true story.)
Originally aiming for a career in football, Texan Fritz Von Erich (born Jack Adkisson—he adopted the Teutonic monicker as a stage persona) never quite seized the National Wrestling Alliance heavyweight title, either. So, as played here by Holt McCallany, he simply pushed that goal onto his sons, running their household as a sort of athletic boot camp. Mother Doris (Maura Tierney) hides behind religious faith as an excuse for not standing up to her domineering spouse, even for the sake of the children. After a B&W prologue, we leap to the late 1970s, when the four Von Erich youth depicted here are all old enough to provide grist for dad’s relentlessly aspirational mill. In classic domestic-bully fashion, he takes their triumphs as his own, while any lost match or other failure is squarely blamed on the individual.
Surviving eldest Kevin (Zac Efron) is perhaps his most avid and dedicated acolyte—so it is sheer perversity that leads Fritz to continually passes him over in favor of younger sons less able to withstand the pressure of pushing for a heavyweight title. (Kevin also scores the one enduring marriage among them, to Lily James as level-headed Pam.)
Their efforts coincide with wrestling’s explosion in popularity due to national cable broadcasts in the 1980s. Steroids are injected, injuries not taken seriously enough, fragile psychologies even less so. Things do not turn out well for David (Harris Dickinson), Kerry (Jeremy Allen White), or Mike (Stanley Simons), the last of whom didn’t even want to wrestle—as shown here, his real love was playing music, which naturally dad nixed.
The pokerfaced melodrama of Arcade Fire member Richard Reed Parry’s original score cues us right away to the fact that The Iron Claw isn’t going to have any fun with its milieu. That’s a questionable choice, given the cartoonishness of various foes the Von Erichs face in the ring, not to mention the side-stepping of issues related to just how “fake” this very staged, stunt-heavy realm of commercialized sportsmanship is. (Are the outcomes of the fights rigged? This movie won’t even raise that question.)
The events and interpersonal conflicts here are dramatic enough to hold our attention over 132 minutes’ course. But the very serious tenor isn’t fully supported by any sense of tragic narrative grandeur or character depth. These people, while well-enough played, lack the complexity to induce more than rote empathy. They aren’t ill-fated… they’ve just got an asshole father they lack the smarts or will to disobey, as much as that costs them.
It doesn’t help, either, that the film’s center is Zac Efron—a not-bad, generically handsome, perpetually shirtless actor who still seems like a stand-in for a real star with a strong personality and ability to suggest inner life. He’s bulked up a great deal here, achieving the blocky, stiff-gaited look of a bodybuilder in a 1960s Hercules movie. But this attempted Rocco and His Brothers of wrestling needs a figure as poignant in his self-sacrificing for the sake of family as Alain Delon’s Rocco; Efron’s muscles and Prince Valiant haircut are poor substitutes for the soulfulness required. Writer-director Durkin does an OK job here. Still, the promise shown by his 2011 debut feature Martha Marcy May Marlene remains unfulfilled. The Iron Claw opens in theaters nationwide Fri/22.
A much more layered and humorous exploration of our cultural obsession with “success” is offered by American Fiction, a first directorial feature by TV writer Cord Jefferson of the miniseries Watchmen and Station Eleven (see 48 Hills’ interview here), that’s an adaptation of Percival Everett’s 2001 novel Erasure. Jeffrey Wright plays Thelonious Ellison aka “Monk,” a somewhat cantankerous university literature professor and author of acclaimed if low-selling literary fiction. He’s disgusted by students who object to reading classic material because they’re triggered by another era’s social attitudes or language, as well as by an administration that coddles such “discomfort” for fear of lawsuits or public criticism.
He’s also steaming over his latest book basically being called “not Black enough” by a reviewer, because it doesn’t revolve around stereotypical depictions of African-American life as all guns, gangs, and welfare-dependent baby mamas. It particularly irks him that the hot new scribe of the moment (Issa Rae as Sintara Golden) panders to exactly such lurid images in her best-selling “We’s Lives In Da Ghetto.” She’s applauded for being “real”—though her own background seems to be even more middle-class-privileged than his own.
When he blows a little too hot in the classroom over these issues, he’s encouraged to take “time off,” traveling across the country to Boston where his family lives—though seeing them is hardly relaxing. Elderly widowed mother Agnes (Leslie Uggams) is in denial about her fast-developing senile dementia. Sister Lisa (Tracee Ellis Ross) is a hospital physician whose marriage has collapsed, and who is tired of being the sole offspring to step up whenever mom has yet another emergency. No help at all is youngest sibling Cliff (Sterling K. Brown), freshly estranged from his wife and kids in Tucson for reasons much related to his horny new embrace of gay sexuality.
Staying at a family beach house that may soon be sold to pay for mom’s inevitable assisted-living costs, Monk deals with these various crises while falling into an unexpected romance with next door neighbor Coraline (Erika Alexander), a public defender in the process of getting divorced. To channel frustrations, he writes his own trashy, pseudononymous parody of “hood” lit, intending no more than a private joke.
But when his skeptical agent sends the manuscript around to publishers, it sparks a bidding war whose monetary offers are too good to turn down, given the Ellison family’s current straits. The situation spirals further when that book (allegedly written by a criminal fugitive) not only becomes a commercial smash and pop-culture phenom, but gets nominated for a prestigious literary award. An award Monk’s “serious” books had never attracted, and which he’s on the jury for—along with nemesis Sintara Golden.
This very tricksy seriocomic story balances satire with engagingly three-dimensional characters, all brought to vivid, nuanced life by a first-rate cast. More muted in tenor than some other adventurous screen African-American cultural critiques of recent years (say, Sorry To Bother You or Jordan Peele’s thrillers), Jefferson’s film isn’t exactly an exhilarating slam-dunk. But it juggles a lot of thematic and tonal balls with real feeling as well as playful panache. It opens at Metreon, Alamo Drafthouse, and Grand Lake theaters this Fri/22.
Approximately the length of American Fiction and The Iron Claw combined is 93-year-old Boston native Frederick Wiseman’s latest Menus-Plaisirs—Les Troisgros. It further extends the master documentary veteran’s exploration of institutions, in this case a restaurant in rural central France that’s been awarded three Michelin stars.
Even after four hours, you’d need to go online to discover some basic facts: The Troisgros family is often credited with more or less inventing what we call nouvelle cuisine, their innovations now carried on through four generations. Or is it five? As ever, Wiseman is not about to explain things—his art is exclusively that of embedded observation, with no narration, interviewed experts, or any other official guides.
In any case, we do learn a lot from these 240 minutes, which are always engaging despite their lack of any narrative arc or pacing momentum. The restaurant—an airy, natural-light-filled modern structure in the woods, which replaced a more traditional urban location some years ago—prides itself on locally sourced ingredients, even growing some of its own vegetables. We also see staff visiting area farmers, ranchers, cheesemakers, and beekeepers, having conversations about environmental maintenance.
Menu planning is a matter both improvisational and exacting. Creativity is encouraged, but you can tell even his own sons are sometimes exasperated by the finicky rigor of proprietor-chief chef Michel’s standards. Yet somehow he always seems to have time to chat at length with patrons about the day’s fare, a conversational task waiters must also perform with a combination of breezy nonchalance and graduate-studies-level specificity.
You might expect this to be a high-pressure environment, at least behind the scenes—if you’ve known people who’ve worked in high-end restaurants, you’ve probably heard plenty of stories about Type A personalities, open drug use and widespread burnout. But there’s no hint of such drama here. From cleaning staff to kitchen to table and beyond, everything seems efficient, professional, impeccable, while also casual (at least in terms of dining atmosphere) and relatively relaxed.
I’ll probably never eat anywhere in the class of this joint, whose prices are not noted… but quite likely can run into the thousands for a meal. It attracts a clientele that correspondingly looks like Old Money meets the Executive Class. Yet it’s interesting to glimpse just how such an enterprise works, and to hear the recitations of crazily unexpected, rarefied ingredients comprising a single dish.
Needless to say, serious foodies will be intoxicated by Menus-Plaisirs—Les Troisgros, which opens this Fri/22 at SF’s Roxie Theater (more info here) and Sat/25 at Rafael Film Center. But Wiseman has a way of making the inner workings of any institution (since 1967 he’s “done” everything from mental asylums, high schools, courtrooms, and UC Berkeley to ballet companies and boxing gyms) absorbing even if you have no personal fascination with the subject. You might still opt to grab a burrito on the way home, but Menus does gently widen one’s perspective on the universe of what the Troisgroses probably seldom call plain old “food.”
