I am the
flattest! How to dump a legend on the canvas
By Jonathan
Romney
17 February
2002
American
biopics, as a rule, are big on invoking the royal
road of destiny. Watching the lives of Great Names unfurl on screen
– whether it's Malcolm X or Jimmy Hoffa, Tina Turner or Andy Kaufman –
we're invariably aware of films taking their subjects by
the hand and marching them towards their telling moment, the
blaring banner headline that sums up a life. Michael Mann's
account of Muhammad Ali's career is no exception, concluding
on a freeze-frame of its hero, arms outstretched after his Kinshasa
triumph over George Foreman.
It's hardly
a surprise that the film ends just here. Yet the
hubristic tag-line of Ali is, "Forget what you think you
know". In other words, we're promised Ali as we've never
seen him before. And in effect, this is what
we get – an Ali without real passion, wit or brio.
Mann has taken one of the most charismatic public
figures of the 20th century and made a film that offers
neither revelation or celebration – a result entirely
characteristic of this flamboyant yet
singularly humourless director.
In fact, the
film is not at all about forgetting what we know,
for it rather assumes we already know a lot about Ali. Mann is
not one of those film-makers who feels obliged to explain things to
us, or politely invites us into his world; his attitude seems
to be that if we don't already share his in-depth
knowledge, then we damn well should have boned up
before we came. Hence the film's strangely
uninvolving account of Ali's complex involvement with the
Nation of Islam; of his
relationship with eccentric trainer-cum-guru Drew
"Bundini" Brown; of three variously fraught marriages.
The oddest
thing the film requires us to forget is that Ali, and his on-screen incarnation
Will Smith, have both in their time
been consummately
entertaining, vibrant figures. Mann plays down Ali's self-made cartoon
image as rhyme-popping PR clown to give us a gravitas-laden agonist with
the weight of African-American history on his shoulders. The key moment in
terms of Ali's career in the ring, to which Mann devotes the film's final
movement, is the "Rumble in the Jungle" in Zaire – an event
evoked with considerably more brio in Leon Gast's 1996 documentary When
We Were Kings. But it is clear that, for Mann, the moral fulcrum of
his subject's life was his challenge to the US government itself –
evoked pithily as a stern-eyed Ali refuses to step forward in the
draft-selection line. It's only typical of Mann's literal-mindedness
that the hard times that follow are evoked
by Ali doggedly trudging through a
grey, snowy night.
We can
forget all we know about Will Smith, too – the personable rapper or the
wry action-pic charmer. This film's Smith is convincingly vulnerable and
certainly sympathetic, yet there's no vim in him; he's soberly pensive,
wearing his impersonation like a solemn mantle. Considering his own rap
prowess, his renditions of the famous spiels seem oddly dutiful, as if to
remind us that the wordplay is less important that the political passion.
There's a definite against-the-grain logic in playing down Ali's image as
a showbiz fixture, yet part of his greatness was the way that he used his
firecracker charisma as a political weapon, his rage all the more
challenging because it came dressed as pleasure.
This lack of
joy is very much a Mann trademark. He believes in the seriousness of
American history, not the surface show.
He's interested in the scenes behind the scenes – in
CIA goons watching from distant hotel windows, in
Ali's and Malcolm X's cavalier treatment from the Nation
of Islam, in the apparent allies who clustered round, then vanished. Mann, however, is much
less interested in character, and we never really know
who Ali is – or
anyone else, for that matter. There are only blips of
the personal life,
such as his rejection of his first wife (Jada Pinkett Smith) for failing
to play the model of Muslim propriety, and the merest teasing intimation
of sexual fecklessness. The only supporting character we really get a
scent of, and then fleetingly, is the troubled, larger-than-life "Bundini"
Brown (Jamie Foxx, the film's most vigorous turn), while Ali's only
developed interplay with another character is his jokily
antagonistic relationship with TV sports-caster
Howard Cosell (a bizarrely made-up and
wigged Jon Voight), and he's more an embodiment of the admiring media than
a character in his own right. Otherwise, it's down
to the odd cameo to leaven matters: Mikelti
Williamson as s hock-headed promoter Don King,
illiteratively out-motormouthing even The Greatest.
As for the
restaged fights, I'll take it on trust that they convincingly reconstruct
Ali's great moves. Although Emmanuel Lubezki's camera gets
inside the ring
and seems to take some pummelling itself, the edited result never quite
evokes real excitement. You don't feel Mann is enthusing about the action
like an honest fan; he's more like a detached, cautiously admiring
analyst. It's as if Mann is playing the contender himself, intent
on
measuring up to his subject, on being Hollywood's Biopic Champ. But he
lacks the heart and the truly nifty moves. |