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Cinderella Man

**½

Directed by Ron Howard

Written by Cliff Hollingsworth

and Akiva Goldsman

Starring Paul Giamatti,

Russell Crowe, Renée Zellweger

Classification: PG

Before Cinderella Man even starts, before an inspiring second has been run in this 2½-hour marathon of hope, an opening crawl appears on a blank screen to kindly inform us: "In all the history of the boxing game, you'll find no human-interest story to compare to the life narrative of James J. Braddock." Say this for director Ron Howard, the guy's not afraid of telegraphing his punches. Punch, actually. Howard has got but a single message to deliver here -- boxer Braddock as the populist American hero of the Depression era -- and he beats us over the head with his uplifting haymaker until we're crumbled on the canvas and crying for mercy: "Oh, Ronnie, no more, I beg you, it's enough, I'm inspired already. Can I please go home now?"

At least Seabiscuit, save for a little neigh-saying, kept his own counsel. Not so plucky Jim Braddock. His unwavering decency, innate courage and stalwart family values must be voiced by a bipedal thespian. The task falls to Russell Crowe, whose faultless protagonist, being of beautiful mind from start to finish, affords him scant room to develop a character and even less to act. Since his performance is boxed into this hallowed corner from the first frame, Crowe is reduced to plying his craft with a faint Irish lilt and two fixed expressions -- an aw-shucks niceness through the good times, a hangdog niceness through the bad times. As for the common denominator, our man of the people sure is nice. So you may not find much raging here, but don't despair -- there's no lack of bull.

When (crawl over) the picture finally begins, the good times get rolled out for a fast preliminary round. Nineteen twenty-nine, and Braddock is riding relatively high in his career, earning $8,000 (U.S.) a fight, living in a comfortable New Jersey home where he enjoys a happy marriage blessed with healthy kids. Postbout, his beloved wife Mae (a brunette Renée Zellweger) greets him at the front door with kisses and kudos: "Oh, Jimmy, I'm so proud of you."

Quick cut to 1933, when the marriage is still strong, along with the pride, but everything else has gone to pot. The house has given way to a hovel, the riches to rags. Now toiling for 25 bucks a match, Braddock is going toe-to-toe with that most wicked and unrelenting of opponents: In this corner, the Great Depression.

What follows is a full hour's worth of grinding poverty that makes Angela's Ashes look like a holiday campfire. Braddock busts his hand. The boxing commission revokes his licence. He can't find work on the docks. The electric company pulls the plug. The milkman no longer cometh. The children are mewling with hunger. Tell-tale cough emanates from a bed-ridden boy. But Daddy's niceness doesn't once go down for the count. Instead, he lectures his son on the ills of Bonnie-and-Clyde behaviour: "We don't steal, not ever." With his tousle-haired daughter, he shares his last slice of baloney (we, on the other hand, are force-fed the stuff).

Eventually, of course, his darkest hour arrives. Yes, sans electricity, the lights are actually out. He goes cap in hand to beg funds from his former boxing cronies. Yes, he has an actual cap, clasped in his actual outstretched hand. It's clear that Howard has never met a metaphor he couldn't literalize.

Enter the comeback, and not a moment too soon. With the notable exception of Martin Scorsese's opus, most boxing flicks suffer form a certain amount of raw-boned sentimentality, the sort of easy melodrama that pits naive underdogs against corrupt overlords, or age against youth, or purity against prejudice. Even the recent Million Dollar Baby succumbed in the final act. But this one, where Rocky meets The Waltons, has us reeling under its saccharine weight. Long-suffering, set-decorated poverty is well and fine for ennobling the spirit, but it's all a tad redundant when the spirit starts out noble -- this fellow was Mother Teresa from the get-go. So, no surprise, a static predictability ensues. Indeed, mired in a yarn that has turned as flat as a razed Hooverville, our own sagging spirits are now desperate for some action. Bring it on.

Happily, on it comes, albeit in the unlikely shape of Paul Giamatti, who steals the picture from the stars by giving it what they can't -- a living, breathing, mouthy, flawed, in-your-face character. Crowe is trapped under his saintly halo. And Zellweger, who's becoming stranger with every outing, chooses to play the loyal missus with little more than her Cold Mountain squint and a "Joisey" accent that strays occasionally, risibly, into Marge Simpson territory. (Alert the Oscar nominators.) But Giamatti, as Braddock's trainer/manager Joe Gould, has a real corker to chew on, and spits him out brilliantly.

His Gould is a street-smart sharpie, a shrewd entrepreneur with one eye on appearances and the other on the main chance. Sweet-talking the boxing promoters, he arranges for Cinderella's escape from the ash bin and return to the limelight -- in a series of bouts where Braddock defies the odds to club his way from victory to miraculous victory, straight up to a championship tussle with the fearsome Max Baer. In each contest, a rotund Gould frantically works the corner, berating the referee, yapping at opponents, patching up his man between rounds and barking out such subtleties of the sweet science as, "Godammit, you fill his face with blood!" Finally, someone not-so-nice to like. Giamatti puts the human in the interest. In fact, he's so vital that the movie seems to have mislaid its subject -- if you're looking to honour the feisty, up-yours spirit that conquered the Depression, forget the brawn of Braddock and celebrate the brains of Gould.

Even Howard and Crowe feed off his energy in the ring. They both do their best work in the fight sequences, whose convincing brutality comes as a welcome reprieve from the surrounding sentimentality. Still, like a busybody playing peacekeeper, the schmaltz keeps horning in on the action. Before the climactic punch-up (where Maple Leaf Gardens stands in for its Madison Square counterpart), it tries to villainize Baer by painting him as a homicidal, trash-talking, tuxedoed brawler to Braddock's working class, I'm-fighting-for-the-milk-money hero. But nobody's buying it, and for two good reasons: (1) How villainous can a man be who gave the world Max Baer Jr., the loveable lout from The Beverly Hillbillies, and (2) Braddock is an awfully enthusiastic basher himself.

In fact, he looks as pleased as the rest of us to be seen doing what the screenplay doesn't -- dancing with the devil and exploring the dark side of his nature. Violence becomes him, and animates him, just as it animates an otherwise listless and sententious film. In that sense, Cinderella Man is a fairy tale whose bellicose meaning belies its pretty message. "You are everybody's hope," coos his wife, and, sadly, maybe she's right. This man of the American people is most alive when he's beating other people to a bloody pulp.