Christy

The Weight of the Gloves

Around twenty minutes into most sports biopics, I can feel the fatigue set in. The pattern announces itself early: hard beginnings, skeptical parents, training montage, redemption on cue. David Michôd's *Christy* initially looks like it might be that movie. It was sold as an inspirational account of Christy Martin, the coal miner's daughter who helped drag women's boxing into the American mainstream in the 1990s. What it actually becomes is far harder to sit with. I kept waiting for the familiar underdog surge. It never really arrives. Instead the film turns into a bruised, upsetting portrait of a woman who used violence in the ring to outrun the more intimate kind waiting for her at home.



Sydney Sweeney seems determined lately to dismantle the version of her screen image everyone thinks they know. After years of being framed as the blonde fantasy object in *Euphoria* and a run of polished romantic comedies, she has been diving into punishing, grubby roles with near-desperate force. Here the change is not really the dark hair or the added muscle. It's in the way she carries herself. Watch what happens when Christy leaves the gym: Sweeney lets the shoulders drop. Inside the ropes she's wound tight; outside them she folds inward, trying to make herself smaller beneath the eyes of her viciously homophobic mother, played with eerie restraint by Merritt Wever, and later under the control of trainer-husband Jim Martin. The *San Francisco Chronicle* called Sweeney a "go-for-broke screen powerhouse," and you can see that effort stamped all over the performance. She batters the heavy bag with real fury. The trouble is that she's propping up a film that doesn't always know how to hold her.

It's odd to watch a David Michôd picture feel this dutiful. This is the filmmaker who made *Animal Kingdom*, a movie alive with menace in every corner. *Christy* often settles for checking off life events in order instead of digging into what any of them feel like. The boxing scenes are messy and unglamorous, filmed with a deliberately muddy eye. Maybe that refusal to prettify the sport is intentional. But it also levels out the movie's emotional peaks. Peter Bradshaw's line in *The Guardian* gets at the problem: the film somehow "manages to be unsubtle without being powerful."



The real center of the film is not boxing anyway. It's the marriage, if you can call it that, between Christy and Jim. Ben Foster doesn't play Jim as some grand manipulator. He makes him a grubby, needy parasite. Early on, after Jim catches Christy reconnecting with her high school girlfriend, he doesn't explode. He hems her in inside a cramped room, belly pressing forward, and lays down an ultimatum that is really just a threat: marry him or lose the career he claims to have made possible. Foster barely lifts his voice above a hoarse rasp. You can almost smell old beer and entitlement. The look Sweeney gives him back—eyes flicking around, already measuring the trap—is maybe the best work she's done onscreen.



I'm not persuaded the rest of the film deserves what its actors are putting into it. The script races through decades and barely pauses over Christy's later relationship with Lisa, played by the badly underused Katy O'Brian, because it is hurrying toward the next horrible collision with Jim. It is a punishing watch. By the third act, the sports story is gone altogether and the film becomes a domestic nightmare built around Jim's real-life 2010 attempted murder of Christy. It's appalling, necessary, and completely exhausting. (Any lofty critical language I reach for starts to feel ridiculous in the face of what actually happened.) *Christy* does not send you out cheering a champion. It sends you out grateful she lived through the men who tried to shape her.