Reviews

The Fire Inside

Have you ever wondered why a country so combative rarely produces any decent boxers? I have. For all Americans are constantly angry at everything, angry enough to follow assholes to Hell itself, the United States hasn’t produced a Mike Tyson or a Muhammad Ali in decades, it seems.

Have we grown complacent? Have we decided we don’t like boxing anymore? Hard to say. I think there’s something to be said for the fact that Americans have decided everything is entertainment, including sports and politics, and thus everything is performative. However, we already treated boxing as entertainment; we have for decades. So why have we suddenly found ourselves champion-less in the sport?

Among the very few Americans with Olympic boxing medals this century is Claressa “T-Rex” Shields (Ryan Destiny as champion Claressa, Jazmin Headley as badass-to-be). If you wanted to make a boxer from scratch, you’d probably start with Claressa’s background: she was born and raised in Flint, Michigan, the poster child for urban poverty. Her neglectful single parent mother is a train wreck. Getting mom to feed her children anything at all was a chore by itself. Claressa’s environment and education were uninspiring and occasionally hostile. All of this made li’l Claressa aggressive and combative.

I imagine most little girls retreat to a safe place inside themselves when confronted with such ugliness. Claressa Shields went the other way. She kept showing up at the gym run by Jason Crutchfield (Brian Tyree Henry). She wanted to fight. Anybody. Any time. And she wasn’t going to take “But you’re a girl!” for an answer.

Similarly, I imagine Jason Crutchfield isn’t overjoyed at the fact that the most talented boxer he ever took on is a girl. Do you know how much money there was in women’s boxing in 2012? It’s similar to having a bottlecap collection, only not as satisfying. Imagine training an angry, aggressive person for the Olympics knowing there’s no money in it, no glory in it, no personal payoff in it … and no parental support.

And yet, the number of people who train athletes for the Olympics is not large. Hence, Jason Crutchfield has the prestige of owning a rare and unique bottlecap collection. There wasn’t any money in it, but he could still boast one of the best bottlecap collections in the country.

The Fire Inside seems a bit paint-by-numbers. Everything I knew about Flint, I learned from Roger & Me back in 1989. I would love to see the progression of the city since. The film is also plagued by reality. By this I mean that the life of Claressa Shields didn’t automatically improve post-Olympics, hence the film peaks far earlier than it should. Oh, and there’s also the problem that the boxing scenes aren’t terribly well choreographed; we’ve all been spoiled by Rocky.

Boxing remains the easiest metaphor in moviedom, so you gotta make something really special to stand out in that crowd. The life of Claressa Shields is compelling enough to recommend a watch, but nothing here will make you forget Creed or Million Dollar Baby or any great boxing film.

There was an angry girl named Claressa
Whose hostility she didn’t suppress-a
Fighting, it would seem
Could lead to a dream
Where it led, however, is anybody’s guess-a

Rated PG-13, 109 Minutes
Director: Rachel Morrison
Writer: Barry Jenkins
Genre: Being pissed off
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: Fighters
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: Misogynists