Southpaw

Southpaw reminds us that the pleasures of a genre film lie less in originality than in the quality of the performance of familiar elements. Being old-hat is a challenge not a disqualification.

The plotline is familiar: a boxer is a single father who fights back to regain his child, title, fortune and especially self-respect. He has to fight and win in the social arena as well as in the ring. In Red Skelton’s The Clown the dad was a — spoiler alert — clown not a fighter but in The Champ he’s a fighter not a clown. Different jobs, same story. Different make-up, same emotions.

However familiar the plot, characters, even speeches, this film still packs a punch. Credit the strong supporting cast, especially Forest Whitaker as the second trainer, Rachel McAdams as the winning doomed wife and especially Oona Lawrence as the tough but needy little daughter. Of course, Jake Gyllenhaal is no mug in the leading role. He persuades us both with his rage and his vulnerability. Odd the film wasn’t called Raging Poppa. 

The fight scenes are almost in the same heavyweight class as Scorsese’s incomparable Raging Bull. Much of the film’s dramatic and emotional wallop comes from the crimson clashes, shot in intense closeup with sharp jabbing cuts and our disorientation matching the fighters’. The plot pours the violence out of the ring into the extra-arena showbiz, where another fight causes the wife’s death. 

Billy Hope’s redemption lies in his overcoming his rage and emotional excess. He needs to do that to get back custody of his daughter. He also has to harness his anger to win the climactic fight. He almost loses it — and also the fight — when he lets his opponent’s marital taunt enflame him. 

But he recovers and wins on the strength of his change not just in character but in tactic. First, his new coach trains him to block punches instead of absorbing them in his version of Ali’s rope-a-dope. He also cultivates his surprising left hook — hence the choice of title. Going southpaw is a metaphor for Billy Hope’s radical change of character that redeems him. 

Billy (nee William) toughens his Will to succeed in his Hope, to recover his family. This is prefigured when he has his daughter spell ‘dismantle’ and ‘hopelessness.’ Billy recovers his Hope by dismantling his old character and developing a new strong reach. That’s the new wine this film pours out of the old bottle, its genre source.

     The film’s full use of scantily-clad ring-number beauties leads to another theory. Why are male-centered sports, like basketball, football, and especially boxing, always accompanied by sexy broads?
      There’s an erotic element in watching impressive male specimens groping each other and joining in emotional violence, especially when they’re stripped down as in basketball and boxing. (Hockey doesn’t count here.) The spectacle therefore provides exposed beautiful women to provide a hetero relief — and perhaps save us from acknowledging the homoerotic potential in macho sports. That’s why in bromances — whether Starsky and Hutch, Butch and Sundance, even down to the Ted flicks — one guy always has a girlfriend.
     Not that there’s anything wrong with that.