Cinderella Man vs Spellbound

If I've learned anything from the movies, it's that during the Great Depression, times were tough, so tough you could barely feed your family, so tough you might nearly freeze to death inside your own home. People held on though, because they had hope, and because they believed in a better tomorrow, and because that kid from Philly is gonna wrestle a bear next weekend, and he represents everyone's dreams for a hot breakfast. I think. Movies have led me to believe that sports brought the country together time and again, elevating the human spirit and so on. There's no food on the table, but he did it! That kid whupped that bar! Good on you, sports! Jim Braddock was one of those sports heroes: a good man, husband and boxer who was such an underdog and all-around good egg that the entire country was pulling for him. He's like Seabiscuit, only he'll hit you.

For a while, Jim Braddock was one of the country's most promising boxers. He was rich, had a beautiful and dedicated wife and a huge house with one of those backyards where someone always seems to have just gotten married. And then the Depression hit, and Jim became one of dozens of men waiting outside a gate to be allowed to work on the docks for a day, his wife and kids relegated to a tiny, dark apartment, his right hand broken too many times to keep him in the ring.

Jim Braddock is played by Russell Crowe, and it's another of those performances that makes Crowe worth just a little bit more per dollar than other actors. I mean, you get the great performance, but then there's the whole physical transformation—the weight gain, or loss, the fake teeth, the hair; Russell Crowe puts in a lot of time. The Insider was just a few years ago, and Master and Commander fits in between. It hardly even seems like the same guy. What's so great about this performance is that all the method trouble Crowe goes to is in the service of a character that is so unbelievably nice and good we would root for him even if he wasn't a badass in the ring, which he is.

Like Seabiscuit, Cinderella Man paints a version of the Great Depression that is picturesque, but also remarkably sad and lonely. Jim and his wife Mae (Renee Zellwegger) have just a bit of a quaint Hard Knock Life going on, with their tiny apartment and kids stealing from butchers (for those first few moments of poor, you might expect, as I did, the Braddocks to acquire an adorable puppy on crutches), but as the movie progresses, we see just how scary life must have been in that time. If you've got no money or electricity, what are you going to do if someone gets sick? Renee Zellwegger has multiple scenes where she's asked to do nothing more than sit at a table and wait for Jim to come home, or maybe to poke at a skillet with a fork, but she invests her character with the same goodness and strength as Jim Braddock. Once Jim starts fighting again (and you knew he was gonna), Mae is terrified he'll be killed, but she knows it's their only hope for a home with heat, so she relents, provided she never have to watch or listen to a boxing match. Luckily, Jim isn't alone in his matches; he's got Joe, his manager and friend, played by Paul Giamatti, who hasn't made a single wrong choice on-screen for about a decade.

Ron Howard directed Cinderella Man, and even though he's as nice a guy as Jim Braddock, he films surprisingly brutal fights. Jim's biggest rival (both physically and symbolically) is Max Baer, played by an unrecognizable Craig Bierko. Max Baer was a real man, but he must have been born for the sake of fiction, because he's too good to be true. Max Baer is like Bluto come to life: a hulking bully of a man, punching boxers not just with massive force, but with spite. Baer's fighting style suggests the other guys have a lot of nerve stepping into the ring, and now need to be taught a lesson. And he's maybe got a point: two boxers went up against Baer and didn't survive. So if you're Mae Braddock, and there's barely enough bologna to feed the kids, and the lights have been shut off, and boxing's the only thing that might change that? Well Mae, you might want to light a couple candles at church tonight.

I'm sure there are multiple elaborations and exaggerations in Cinderella Man. To that I give a hearty “so.” A Hollywood biography is not a documentary. This is an important thing to learn. When we watch The Hurricane, or A Beautiful Mind or Erin Brockovich, we aren't getting the truth. We're getting some truth, of course, but mainly what we're getting is drama, and that's fine with me. So, I'm sure a lot of the events in Cinderella Man actually happened; maybe even most of them. I'm not overly concerned. I'm more interested in the drama, and in Cinderella Man, it's quite good, truth or not. It's the heart of the thing, see, and Jim Braddock has so much heart. Sure he's pounding Max Baer with relentless sledgehammer lefts, but Max is a bad man, standing between Jim and a lifetime of payable light bills.

I know how some of you think. You see a movie about a boxer, you wanna come home and watch more punching (or worse yet, you come home and wanna hit something yourself). For me, the attraction to movies like Cinderella Man is all about the underdog. I'm rooting for Jim Braddock because he's such a long shot; if he wins, think how inspired I might be. If I just wanted to be in line with the winner, I'd be a Max Baer man, right? Spellbound is a film as tense and exciting as the best boxing dramas, without a single punch thrown. Even better, it's chock full of underdogs: smart, nerdy underdogs.

Spellbound is a documentary tracing the lives of eight kids as they vie for the championship in the National Spelling Bee. Each one has won contests leading up to the national bee, so we know going in that the kids are smart—or at least good spellers. I suppose it's possible to be good at spelling and nothing else. Because we see each kid from just before the tournament until its finish, we have no way of predicting which kid might win, and the filmmakers couldn't either. What if none of the kids they've chosen to spotlight wins? Or don't even make it to the finals?

Each of the kids has a home life which implies that maybe spelling is their best bet for a future. Most of the kids are poor, some first-generation Americans (except for one Max Baer-ish girl on the equestrian team). When their families are interviewed, Spellbound delves into a near-Christopher Guest level of simultaneous sadness and hilarity, and you might have to remind yourself that these are real people.

And when those kids spell? Oh man. It's not that the words are huge (and some of them are) or that they're difficult (although they are surely that too), it's that they're uncommon. The kids are allowed to hear the words more than once, and at times, I got the impression that it wasn't to get a better handle on the spelling, but as a way of saying, “What the hell?” When my favorites were on the podium (you can pick out the most underdoggish ones right away), and those letters start building, I'm like Mae Braddock: too nervous to watch. I'll just sit in the kitchen, and you can tell me what happened when it's over.

Cinderella Man: B+
Spellbound: A-