The Color of Money

The 1970’s saw the rise of the Movie Brats, a collection of filmmakers that had grown up watching and studying films. They made challenging films that reflected the times in which they were made and were revered by cineastes as much as some of the actors appearing in them. Directors like William Friedkin, Francis Ford Coppola, Hal Ashby and Martin Scorsese made intensely personal films that blended a European sensibility with American genre films. However, the one-two punch of Jaws (1975) and Star Wars (1977) and the failure of expensive passion projects like New York, New York (1977) and Heaven’s Gate (1980) ended these directors’ influence and saw the rise of producers like Joel Silver, Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, and movie star-driven blockbusters in the 1980’s and beyond. It got harder and harder for the Movie Brats to get their personal projects made. Most of them went the independent route, making films for smaller companies like Orion and doing the occasional paycheck gig with a Hollywood studio.


For years, Scorsese had been trying to fund a personal project of his own – an adaptation of The Last Temptation of Christ. It was a tough sell and he ended up making After Hours (1985) and The Color of Money (1986) as a way of keeping busy while he tried to get Last Temptation made. At the time of The Color of Money much was made of it being Scorsese’s first movie star-driven film and some critics and fans of the director felt that he was selling out. It would not only be promoted as a film starring Paul Newman and Tom Cruise (and not as a Martin Scorsese film), but was a sequel (something that the director was never fond of doing) of sorts. Newman had been interested in reprising his famous role of "Fast" Eddie Felson from The Hustler (1961) for some time but he had never met the right person for the job – that is, until he met Scorsese.

The Color of Money begins twenty-five years after the events depicted in The Hustler and we find that Eddie (Paul Newman) is enjoying a comfortable existence as a savvy liquor salesman with his bar owner girlfriend Janelle (Helen Shaver) and occasionally fronting a pool hustler. His current investment, a cocaine addict named Julian (played with just the right amount of sleazy arrogance by John Turturro), is getting roundly beaten by a young turk named Vincent (Tom Cruise) who catches Eddie’s attention with his “sledgehammer break.” He becomes fascinated watching Vincent play and his cocky behavior between shots, like how he works the table. Eddie also watches the dynamic between Vincent and his girlfriend Carmen (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio). What really catches his attention is not just Vincent’s raw talent but also his passion for the game. He’s even willing to play Julian after he’s won all of the guy’s money because he just wants his “best game.”

There’s a nice bit where Eddie tests Carmen’s skill as Vincent’s manager, exposing her lack of experience and schooling her on the basics of pool hustling in a beautifully written monologue by Richard Price that Newman nails with the ease of a seasoned pro. We get another healthy dose of Price’s authentic streetwise dialogue in the next scene where Eddie takes Vincent and Carmen out for dinner and continues to school his potential protégés: “If you got an area of excellence, you’re good at something, you’re the best at something, anything, then rich can be arranged. I mean rich can come fairly easy.” The scene is also nicely acted as Tom Cruise plays the cocky upstart with just the right amount of arrogant naiveté without being a typical goofball. As Eddie puts it, “You are a natural character. You’re an incredible flake,” but tells him that he can use that to hustle other players. The ex-pool player lays it all out for the young man: “Pool excellence is not about excellent pool. It’s about becoming something … You gotta be a student of human moves.” And in a nice bit he proves it by making a bet with them that he’ll leave with a woman at the bar. Of course, he knows her but it certainly proves his point. This is a wonderful scene that begins to flesh out Vincent and establish how much he and Carmen have to learn and how much Eddie has since The Hustler.

The young man is a real piece of work – brash, directionless but with raw talent. It is clear that Eddie sees much of his younger self in Vincent and decides to take the young man under his wing and teach him "pool excellence" by taking him and Carmen on the road. It’s an opportunity to make some money while also getting back Eddie’s passion for playing pool. The Color of Money proceeds to show the three of them on the road for six weeks, getting ready for an upcoming nine-ball tournament in Atlantic City. Of course, there are the predictable bumps in the road as Vincent’s impulsive knack for showing off costs them money and Eddie feels like the young man’s not listening to him. It’s a formula we’ve seen used in countless films but Scorsese does everything he can visually to keep things interesting, especially in the dynamic way he depicts the numerous games of pool, the use of music (for example, one game is scored to “Werewolves of London” by Warren Zevon) and the actors that play some of the opponents along the way, like a young Forest Whitaker as a skilled player that manages to hustle and beat Eddie at pool.

However, it is the camerawork by veteran cinematographer Michael Ballhaus that impresses the most. He and Scorsese depict each game differently, employing a variety of techniques, like quick snap zooms in and out, and floating the camera gracefully over the pool table or gliding around it. He even has the camera right on the pool table following the balls around. The camera movement and editing rhythm of each game is dictated by the mood and intensity of each match, like the grandiose techniques employed when Vincent shows off during a game of pool. As he revels in his own showboating moves, the camera spins around him as if intoxicated by his bravado. However, much like the chaotic pool hall brawl in Mean Streets (1973), the camera movement goes nowhere symbolizing the futility of Vincent’s actions. Sure, he beat the top guy at that pool hall but in doing so scared off an older player that had much more money.

While The Color of Money was made fairly early on in Tom Cruise’s career, his relative inexperience actually suits his character. His youthful energy mirrors Vincent’s. It is his job to come across as an arrogant flake of a human being, which he does quite well (too well for some who were unimpressed with his performance). Cruise has always been an actor that performs better surrounded by more talented and experienced people and with the likes of Paul Newman acting opposite him and Scorsese directing, it forces the young actor to raise his game. One imagines he learned a lot on the job much like Vincent does in the film. Scorsese knew exactly what he was doing when he cast Cruise and got a solid performance out of him. In the late ‘80s, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio acted in a series of high profile roles like The Abyss (1989), The January Man (1989) and this film. She’s given the thankless job of the girlfriend role but manages to make the most of it. One gets the feeling that Carmen is a fast learner and smarter than Vincent. She is much like Eddie in understanding the business side of pool hustling.

Naturally, Newman owns the film, slipping effortlessly back into Eddie’s skin after more than 20 years and it’s like he never left. The scenes between him and Cruise are excellent as the headstrong Vincent bounces off of the world-weary Eddie. Over the course of the film something happens to the elder pool player. As he tells Vincent at one point, “I’m hungry again and you bled that back into me.” We see that youthful spark fire up in Eddie again after so many years dormant and Newman does a fantastic job conveying that. While many felt that his Academy Award for the performance he gives in The Color of Money was really a consolation prize for a career of brilliant performances, this does a disservice to just how good he is in this film and how enjoyable it is to watch him get to work with someone like Cruise and Scorsese, watching how their contrasting philosophies towards acting and filmmaking co-exist in this film. There is an energy and vitality that Cruise brings and Newman feeds off of it and Scorsese captures it like lightning in a bottle.

When Paul Newman read Walter Tevis’ sequel to The Hustler it made him wonder what “Fast” Eddie Felson would be doing now and wanted to revisit the character. He had seen Raging Bull (1980) and was so impressed by it that he wrote a letter to Scorsese complimenting him on such a fine piece of work. The director was just coming off of After Hours and was attached to several projects, including Dick Tracy, with Warren Beatty, a fantasy film entitled Winter’s Tale, Gershwin, with a screenplay written by Paul Schrader, and Wise Guy, a book about the New York mafia written by Nicholas Pileggi. However, they all took a backseat when Newman invited him to direct a sequel to The Hustler. The actor had been working on it for a year with a writer. Scorsese was interested but didn’t like the script Newman showed him because it was “a literal sequel. It was based on at least some familiarity with the original.” Scorsese felt like he couldn’t be involved with the project if he didn’t have some input on the original idea of the script.

Scorsese wanted to go in a different direction and brought in a new screenwriter, novelist Richard Price who had written The Wanderers and also a script for the director based on the film Night and the City (1950). Scorsese liked the script because it had “very good street sense and wonderful dialogue.” For The Color of Money, Price and Scorsese’s concept was basically what became the film, exploring the director's preoccupation with redemption but with what Newman saw as "recapturing excellence, having been absent from it, and then witnessing it in somebody else." Newman liked it and Price and Scorsese came up with an outline and began rewriting the script. Price studied pool players and wrote 80 pages of a script. They took it to Newman and got his input. By the end of nine months, Price and Scorsese decided to make the film with Newman.

For Scorsese this was the first time he had ever worked with a star of Newman's magnitude. "I would go in and I'd see a thousand different movies in his face, images I had seen on that big screen when I was twelve years old. It makes an impression.” As a result, Scorsese and Price made the mistake of writing for themselves when they should have tailored the script to suit Newman and his image, or as Scorsese later said, "we were making a star vehicle movie." The actor wanted to explore aging and the fear of losing his “pool excellence.” He also wanted the character of Minnesota Fats, played so memorably by Jackie Gleason in The Hustler, to return but Price couldn’t get the character to fit into the script. He and Scorsese even presented a version of the script with Fats in it to Gleason but he “felt it was an afterthought,” said Scorsese.

It was Newman that suggested Cruise for the role of Vincent to Scorsese. The young actor had met Newman before when auditioning to play his son in Harry & Son (1984). Scorsese cast Cruise before Top Gun (1986) had come out but he was a rising movie star thanks to Risky Business (1983). He had seen the young actor in All the Right Moves (1983) and liked him. The project was initially at 20th Century Fox but they didn’t like Price’s script and didn’t want to make it even with Cruise and Newman attached. Eventually, it went to Touchstone Pictures.

Newman was not fond of improvising on the set and suggested two weeks of rehearsals before filming. Scorsese wasn’t crazy about this and found them “aggravating. You are afraid that you are going to say ridiculous things, and the actors feel that way too.” However, he agreed to it and brought in Price so that he could make changes to the script. Fortunately, everyone felt secure in character and with each other. Price and Scorsese didn’t have the film’s ending resolved and felt that they had written themselves into a corner. The studio wanted them to shoot the film in Toronto but Scorsese felt that it was too clean and chose Chicago instead. Both Cruise and Newman did all their own pool playing with the former being taught how to do specific shots that he played in the film with the exception of one, which would have taken two additional days to learn and Scorsese didn’t want to spend the time. Cruise had dedicated himself to learning how to play pool: “All I had in my apartment was a bed and a pool table.” He worked with his trainer and the film’s pool consultant Mike Sigel for months before shooting started.

In his review for The New York Times, Vincent Canby wrote, “The Color of Money isn't Mean Streets or Raging Bull. It is, however, a stunning vehicle – a white Cadillac among the other mainstream American movies of the season.” Time magazine’s Richard Schickel wrote, “There is a ferocity in Cruise's flakiness that he has not previously had a chance to tap. That, in turn, gives Newman something to grapple with. There is a sort of contained rage in his work that he has never found before, and it carries him beyond the bounds of image, the movie beyond the bounds of genre.” The Globe and Mail’s Jay Scott wrote, “It may be true that in gambling money won is twice as sweet as money earned, but in art, only the earned has savor; The Color of Money earns enough of it to turn most other movies persimmon with esthetic envy.” In his review for the Washington Post, Paul Attanasio wrote, “But in the final third of the movie, the real drama takes place within Fast Eddie himself, as his dissatisfaction with what he's become almost imperceptibly grows, and he tries to decide, in middle age, who he wants to be. That involves a shift in the movie's focus to Newman alone; and if what's lost is the excitement that Newman and Cruise had generated together, what's gained is a kind of depth another, simpler story wouldn't have had.” However, Roger Ebert gave the film two-and-a-half stars out of four and wrote, “Maybe the problems started with the story, when Newman or somebody decided that there had to be a young man in the picture; the introduction of the Cruise character opens the door for all of the preordained teacher-pupil clichés, when perhaps they should have just stayed with Newman and let him be at the center of the story.”

Some Scorsese fans marginalize The Color of Money as one of his paycheck films – the first he did for the money – and while it may not have the personal feel of a film like Taxi Driver (1976), it still has its merits, a strong picture that fits well into the man's body of work. I would argue that it is one of his strongest films stylistically with some truly beautiful, often breathtaking camerawork capturing all the nuances of playing pool: the energy and vitality of the game is there without sacrificing any of the story or the characters. This film also shows how a director like Scorsese can take a hired gun project and make it his own. It looks, sounds and, most importantly, feels like one of his films and not a commercial studio picture. Others must have agreed as the film not only became Scorsese's most financially successful film at the time but a critical hit as well. The director proved to the studios that he could deliver the goods at the box office while to himself he was still able to invest the film with some of his own personal touches. Ultimately, The Color of Money is about Eddie’s redemption and rekindling the spark he had in The Hustler before the screws were put to him. As with many sports movies, the story builds towards the climactic big game or, in the case of this film, the big tournament but Price’s script offers a slight twist in that Eddie’s victory is a hollow one and the real one is at the very end when his love for playing pool has finally come back completely. He is reinvigorated and excited about where his life and game will go from here and this is summed up beautiful in the film’s last line – “I’m back.”

DVD of the Week: Blue Chips

Oh, how the mighty have fallen. In the 1970s, director William Friedkin was at the peak of his powers. The one-two punch of The French Connection (1971) and The Exorcist (1973) made him a force to be reckoned with. And then, he made Sorcerer (1977), a critical and commercial failure. His industry clout disappeared as fast as he had acquired it. Studios did not want to deal with his inflated ego and hard-headed pragmatism. Other than the excellent, To Live and Die in L.A. (1985) Friedkin has made one forgettable film after another through the 1980s and 1990s. On paper, Blue Chips (1994) must have seemed like a good idea. Team up Friedkin with a Ron Shelton (responsible for one of the best sports films ever, Bull Durham) penned screenplay to create a hard-hitting expose on college basketball. So, what happened?

Just to let us know that he hasn’t completely sold out; Friedkin opens the film by having college basketball coach Pete Bell (Nick Nolte) chew out a locker room full of players. He yells at them for a bit before walking out and then comes back in for more yelling. Repeat. It is a scene we’ve seen a million times before but this time it has a jarring effect because Friedkin drops us into the scene without any explanation, leaving it up to the audience to figure out what’s going on.

Bell is under a lot of pressure. Having experienced his first losing season, he’s still feeling the heat from accusations that his team shaved points off a game a few years ago. It continues to dogs him much to his chagrin. The powerful head of the alumni (played with oily, reptilian charm by consummate character actor, J.T. Walsh) dangles a carrot in front of Bell: use the power of the alumni coffers to recruit better players. Bell resists. He’s proud of the fact that he’s never resorted to illegal tactics that have tainted the game.

So, Coach Bell drives across the country trying to recruit players like a travelling salesman, sweet-talking families. But he soon finds that in order to get good players he has to do more than promise substantial courses and a vibrant campus life. Colleges not only have to convince the potential player but his family as well. The bottom line almost always comes down to this: what does the school have to offer them and their son? It’s not just a strong school, but, for some, the promise of a new house, a car, or a job. And so, Bell finally gives in and makes a deal with the film’s devil — Walsh’s slick, head of alumni, decked out in expensive suits and a buxom blond on each arm.

Why? College basketball represents big money through television revenue. A winning team draws bigger crowds and therefore more money. This makes the school’s alumni happy and willing to give more money to the school for certain programs, like the basketball team, thus ensuring future excellence in the sport. It is a cycle that feeds on itself. When one of these parts breaks down, the devastating ripples are felt throughout.

Nick Nolte is well cast as the intense, hard-drinking (what else?), hard-nosed coach who is feeling the pressure. The veteran actor has that natural, world-weariness that makes him perfect for the role and the rugged physicality that makes him believable as a big-time college basketball coach. Nolte not only talks the talk but he also walks the walk as evident in a basketball practice sequence where he actually conveys the impression that he knows what he’s doing. He backs this up with his on-court antics that are right out of games you’ve seen on T.V. Blue Chips also has the NBA pedigree with the likes of retired legends like Larry Bird and then-marquee players like Shaquille O’Neal and “Penny” Hardaway populating the movie.

Friedkin doesn’t seem all that interested in the basketball sequences, shooting them in the standard way that we have seen on T.V. instead of trying something different, like employing his trademark you-are-there cinema verite which would have captured the intensity of a live game, much as Oliver Stone did in Any Given Sunday (1999). Friedkin seems more interested in the off-court mechanics: the wheeling and dealing needed to get raw talent from high schools to their college without a rival school stealing/enticing them away, and Bell wrestling with his conscience. This is when the film is at its strongest and most interesting.

Blue Chips is fine until its conclusion when it suddenly loses its freakin’ mind as a guilt-ridden Bell tries to redeem himself at a post-game press conference. It just doesn’t seem believable — especially when this scene is followed by a staggeringly naïve, it-starts-with-our-kids message that is way too preachy. It betrays what the film has been saying up to this point: that no one seems to play for the love of the game anymore. Everybody wants something – money, a house, a car, or a job. Ultimately, Blue Chips is about an honest man who sells his soul, who gives into overwhelming pressure to get what he wants and who loses his way. Friedkin almost pulls it off and the sudden, pat ending makes one wonder if he originally intended a more downbeat ending only for the timid studio to impose a more positive conclusion. In doing so, they’ve alienated the audience who was with them up until that point.

Special Features:

Nothing. Considering what a good job Friedkin has been doing revisiting his old films and whole-heartedly supporting the DVD medium, one wonders if there was some friction between him and the studio on this film. Maybe they decided not to ask for his participation lest the notoriously vocal filmmaker sound off on any potential conflicts that arose during filming or how he views the film now.

Michael Mann Week: Ali

This post originally appeared at the Film for the Soul blog as part of The Year 2001 project.
Ever since Ali was released in 2001, I have felt that it has been one of Michael Mann’s most under-appreciated films. It received decidedly mixed reviews and underperformed at the box office. While Will Smith was praised for his impressive physical transformation into legendary boxer Muhammed Ali, the film itself was criticized for revealing nothing new about the man. Herein lies the problem that Mann faced: how do you shed new light on one of the most documented historical figures of the 20th century? His angle on the material was to look inwards.

Proposals for an Ali biopic had been around since the early 1990s when producer and one-time business partner of the boxer, Paul Ardaji, pitched the idea to the man on his 50th birthday. Ali gave the project his blessing and financing quickly fell into place. A number of scripts were written by the likes of Gregory Allen Howard (Remember the Titans) and Stephen J. Rivele and Christopher Wilkinson (Nixon), but they all failed to please the powers that be. The project bounced around various studios for years as executives tried to decide who should make it, who should star in it, and would it even make a profit? In 1991, Oliver Stone met with Ali about making a film about his life but the collaboration ended when the director refused to share creative control. In 1992, Ali’s best friend and personal photographer Howard Bingham and Ali’s wife Lonnie got together with Ardaji. Gregory Allen Howard’s take on Ali was delivered in 1996. His angle was that the key to the boxer’s life was his relationship with his father, who ignored him.

When Will Smith met Ali in 1997, the boxer asked the actor to play him in the film. Smith was flattered but said no. He was not ready and too intimidated for such a demanding role. The actor almost did it when Barry Sonnenfeld agreed to direct. Both men had worked together on the Men in Black films and Wild Wild West (1999). Thankfully, their version never saw the light of day. After he turned 30, Smith realized that he had to make the decision about playing Ali. However, when no one could settle on a script, Sonnenfeld dropped out. There were several more rewrites and directors, including Curtis Hanson who expressed interest. Smith was ready to give up on the project.

It then came down to Spike Lee or Michael Mann to fill the director's chair left empty by Sonnenfeld. Sony Pictures, the studio bankrolling the film, was faced with a $100+ million budget and went with Mann who had just received several Academy Award nominations and all kinds of critical praise for The Insider (1999). Upset, Lee voiced his anger through a friend in The New York Post: "only a black man could do justice to the Cassius Clay story," he was reported as saying. Mann responded that he "wanted the film to come from the point of view of the main character, Muhammed Ali. I'm not interested in showing a white man's idea of how someone suffered racism. The perspective of the film has to be African-American." When asked why he did not pick a black director Ali said that he wanted the best qualified person regardless of color, and his wife said, “Muhammad didn’t want it to be a movie just for black audiences. He wanted it to be a movie for all cultures and all people.”

When Mann was approached to direct he wasn’t even sure if he wanted to tackle such challenging subject matter but was sure of one thing; he did not want to make a docudrama or idealize Ali's life. After meeting with Ali and his wife, they told him that they did not want “a teary Hallmark-greeting version of Muhammad Ali ... What they didn’t want I didn’t want,” Mann remembers. The director liked Rivele and Wilkinson’s screenplay but rejected their flashback structure and their use of Ali’s 1978 fight, the “Thrilla in Manila,” as the present frame of the story. Mann felt that Ali’s 1974 fight in Zaire was more significant. He was also not interested in spelling things out for the audience: “I wanted to insert you into the stream of this man’s life, orient you without doing it in a blatant way with exposition.” Ironically, this is what would scare off a lot of people.

Smith's agent arranged a meeting with Mann that changed his attitude towards the film. According to the actor, it was "the clear picture he had of the road from Will Smith to Muhammed Ali. He explained it in a way that made it seem, in my mind at least, not so utterly impossible, just marginally improbable." Smith and Mann agreed that the film’s focus should be on ten turbulent years of Ali's life, from 1964 to 1974. The director set the film during these years because "that formation of everything by '74 is the beginning of what is now culturally in the United States." Mann identified Ali with the spirit of change that occurred in the 1960s. "He consistently defied the establishment and its conventions, and we loved him for it." Ali led such a colorful, eventful life that a focused story was crucial to the film. Mann said in an interview, “It would be catastrophic to divert into every interesting story. Everything this guy does is fascinating. I could have made an entire movie about Ali's relation to women. Music, Cadillac convertibles and women. It would have been great.”

By February 23, 2000, Mann signed on to the film and went to work transforming Will Smith into Ali. Smith remembers that Mann created the "Muhammad Ali Course Syllabus” that began with a study of the boxer’s physical attributes: “learning to run how he ran, to eat the food he ate, spar the way he sparred. Essentially creating the physical life and physical appearance of Muhammad Ali.” From there, Smith moved on to the mental and emotional aspects and finally the man’s spirituality. Boxer trainer-choreographer Darrell Foster spent a year training Smith. Foster was Sugar Ray Leonard's conditioning coach when the boxer turned pro. According to Foster, the key to becoming Ali was "looking for specific movements. Hand speed, ring generalship, how he made guys miss. Will had to become Ali, because you can't demonstrate those moves through choreography." Foster created a high-carb, high-protein diet for Smith and had him run in combat boots through snow in the thin air of Aspen, Colorado for ten months before the start of filming. His training schedule consisted of five miles of roadwork starting at 5:30 am, in the gym at 11:30 am, six days a week for three hours of ring work and weight training, watching fight films at 3 pm, and weight training in the evening. Smith put on 35 pounds of pure muscle in four months and went from bench-pressing 175 pounds to being able to press a very impressive 365 pounds. The finishing touch was being fitted with a hairpiece and a prosthetic nose.

For the fights, Foster started Smith on the basics: balance, footwork and defense. Then, he worked with the actor on the offensive aspects: a mix of overhand rights, hooks and upper cuts. Foster remembers that Smith "thought he knew how to fight because he had some street fights. But really, he couldn't fight at all." Smith worked on his hand and eye reflexes in order to perform eleven of Ali's signature moves. Smith spent days studying film of Ali, including early footage shot when he was an Olympic boxing champion to interviews with Howard Cosell. Much of the material, unseen for years, was supplied by Leon Gast, a documentary filmmaker who made When We Were Kings (1996), a celebrated and acclaimed documentary about Ali’s championship bout with George Foreman. Smith also took classes in Islamic studies at the University of California.

The focus on the years 1964 to 1974 are arguably the most fascinating ones of Ali’s life because they are so rife with dramatic possibilities. It was during this period that Ali became the World Boxing Champion after beating Sonny Liston, then lost it when he refused to serve as a foot soldier in the Vietnam War, and finally reclaimed the Championship Title after beating the odds-on favorite, George Foreman in Zaire. It was also a time of great social and political upheaval in the United States with the assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. Finally, Ali also shows the man’s private side: his numerous wives and failed marriages, and his friendships with Malcolm X and Howard Cosell.

Mann immediately immerses the audience in the time period with a montage of footage that features Sam Cooke performing in front of a live audience juxtaposed with Ali jogging alone at night and being harassed briefly by the police. Mann then goes into a montage of Ali training and two boxers fighting with Ali watching. Mann fractures time by also intercutting footage of Ali as a child witnessing the brutality of racism and its effects as he sees a newspaper article about the vicious beating of Emmet Till. The film then cuts back to a mature Ali sitting in on a lecture by Malcolm X. The entire montage is masterfully edited to the beats of a medley of Sam Cooke songs. This opening sequence establishes the Impressionistic take that Mann is to going to have on Ali’s life. It is also one of his most complex, layered opening credits sequence because he shifts time frames and presents us with all of these apparently unconnected images without explaining them. This is done on purpose in order to establish a mood, give an impression of the look and feel of the film and to set up that we are seeing the world through Ali’s eyes.

The fight scenes are covered from every conceivable angle as Mann cuts back and forth from shots outside and inside the ring. The first shot we get of the ring is a close-up of the red ropes and in Mann’s films this color signifies danger. There is the potential for Ali to not just lose the fight but possibly his life. This is a risk every time a boxer steps into the ring. In the Liston fight, Mann alternates between camerawork inside the ring, with tight and close point-of-view angles so that we are right in the ring with the boxers, and shots just outside of the ring but still close to the fighters. This gives the fight scenes a real visceral impact and immediacy that has not been seen since Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull (1980). The Liston fight also shows how Ali could work a crowd of boxing fans just as well and in just the same way as the crowd of journalists before the fight.

Unlike most boxing films, Mann wanted to get inside the ring in order "to bring you inside the strategy and tactics, to bring you into the round as far as I could." To this end, Mann would often be in the ring with the fighters with a very small digital camera. To achieve the most realistic fight scenes possible, Mann really had Smith and the other boxers hit each other. The director recalled one such incident: “When James Toney as Joe Frazier knocks Will down, we did three takes of that — every single one of those left hooks he connected. When Will stands up on the one that's in the film, that wobble is not acting — you can tell how shaky he is.”

Mann also uses a cool, blue color to suggest intimacy and does so in the scene where Ali and Sonji (Jada Pinkett Smith), who would become his first wife, dance in a nightclub. They are close together, flirting with each other as Mann drenches the scene in blue much like he did with Neil McCauley entering his house in Heat (1995) and Will and Molly making love in Manhunter (1986). Ali is temporarily in an area of safety and love but this will change very soon.

After an interview with legendary broadcaster Howard Cosell (Jon Voight), Ali’s life takes a turn for the worse as he refuses to be inducted in the Army and is arrested. He then denounces the war in an interview and is subsequently labeled as being unpatriotic. He is stripped of his boxing title as Heavyweight Champion of the World, his boxing license and his passport. Like Jeffrey Wigand in The Insider, Ali is threatened by the powers that be for telling the truth and being his own man. It becomes obvious that this is a war of attrition in an effort to bleed Ali dry financially and threaten him with five years in jail. Then, as if to add insult to injury, the Temple of Islam suspends him just like they did to Malcolm X.

Cosell and Ali meet up and the veteran broadcaster, conscious of how bad off his friend is but not acknowledging it publicly, puts him on television despite network pressure. Cosell allows Ali to speak his peace about his ban and dazzles everyone again with his showmanship. It really is a testimony to Cosell that he did this. When everyone else had abandoned Ali, the T.V. personality stuck by him and used his considerable clout to put him back in the public eye. This interview is the turning point for Ali who wins a fight. Only then does Herbert and the Temple of Islam come back to him but Ali makes it clear that they do not own him. His eyes have been opened and he now knows just how much he can trust them.

Ali culminates with the legendary Rumble in the Jungle where Ali fought George Foreman in Zaire. Ali was not the favorite going in as Foreman was younger, stronger and the Champ. Mann, again, hints at the potential danger of this opponent when we see Foreman training, pounding a punching bag with powerful hits all with a greenish filter, a sign of peril in a Mann film. Sure enough, during this period Ali drives away his second wife (Nona Gaye) who does not like his relationship with the Temple of Islam because she feels that they are exploiting him. While still married to her, Ali becomes interested in a female journalist (Michael Michele) from Los Angeles who is in Zaire doing a profile on the boxer. This relationship effectively ruins his second marriage and Mann does not gloss over this showing that Ali was clearly in the wrong.

This portion of the film was shot in Johannesburg, South Africa and from there, an hour journey to Maputo, Mozambique because Mann liked the architecture in Maputo. In 1974, the legendary "Rumble in the Jungle" bout between Ali and George Foreman took place in Kinshasa, Zaire which had since become the Democratic Republic of Congo, but there was too much political unrest for Mann to shoot there in 2000. Associate producer Gusmano Gesaretti remembers that Mann fell in love with the architecture in Maputo. It was predominantly built by the Portuguese during the middle to later part of the century with buildings done in Art Deco-style curves and arches alongside others with straight lines in the block style of the 1960s. All were very aged and weather-beaten and looked very much the way Kinshasa was in the 1970s.

The "Rumble in the Jungle" was filmed over five weeks in Machava Stadium, five kilometers northwest of Maputo. The stadium was used to host large international soccer tournaments but had fallen into disrepair — there wasn't even any electricity. The production spent $100,000 repairing and upgrading the 64,000-seat capacity stadium. They structurally engineered and replicated a ring and canopy that was 40 feet high, 82 feet wide and weighed over 40 tons. Over 10,000 extras were needed for the scene where Ali makes his entrance into the stadium. Fliers were distributed in Maputo inviting people to watch the filming. The production also cast 2,000 extras that would be costumed and fill seats on the floor around the ring. On the night of the scene, over 30,000 people showed up.

Known mostly for mindless, yet entertaining action films like Bad Boys (1995) and Independence Day (1996), Will Smith was not exactly most people’s first choice to play Muhammad Ali. However, Smith shows that he has the capacity for more substantial work with Six Degrees of Separation (1993) but he had never attempted anything as challenging as this project. Smith captures Ali’s distinctive speech patterns, especially his flamboyant, larger-than-life public persona. Like Anthony Hopkins before him in Nixon (1995), Smith does not look exactly like the actual person he is playing. Instead, he manages to capture the essence and the spirit of the man. He also does a good job of conveying Ali’s conflict between his loyalty to Islam and to his family and friends. Smith peels back the layers to show that there was so much more than Ali’s flashy public side. For example, most people only saw Ali and Cosell as antagonists, but this was only for show. In fact, they were good friends and the sportscaster was willing to help him out in any way possible.

Did Mann meet with much studio interference? "Oh, I’m sure the studio would have wanted a different movie altogether. They'd have wanted it PG-13 as opposed to R-rated, which means you can't say 'motherfucker.' That would have added another $20m to the box office." Mann did have to worry about an escalating budget. Originally set at $100 million, it had risen into the neighborhood of $109 million. It made Sony so nervous that they shut down the production for a week in the autumn of 2000 until Mann and Smith agreed to trim some of the production costs and assume partial financial responsibility for budget overruns. The studio also brought in foreign investors who would distribute the film overseas.

Ali received decidedly mixed reviews. Time magazine’s Richard Schickel wrote, “It does not brutally impose itself on the audience as so many big, riskily expensive films do ... A thoughtful epic is both a rarity and an oxymoron. But that’s what Ali is, and you can’t help being drawn sympathetically into its hero’s struggle for mastery of himself and his era.” In his review for The New York Times, Elvis Mitchell wrote, “The script has been developed to give Mr. Smith the opportunity to burrow inside Ali ... Mr. Smith captures Ali’s musicality, pausing in midsyllable while ranting and exhaling to punch things up and turn even a joke into something operatic.” In his review for the Daily News, Jack Mathews wrote, “More problematic is the tonal switch from public to private Ali. Smith lowers his voice to an occasionally inaudible level, and while attempting to show Ali drawing inside himself, the actor virtually disappears.”

Rick Groen, in his review for the Globe and Mail, wrote, “The fights scenes look as realistic as any ever staged for the camera, equal to and at times even better than Scorsese’s celebrated work in Raging Bull.” In his review for the Toronto Star, Geoff Pevere wrote, “Mann offers this defining decade in Ali’s life as series of almost musically composed fleeting impressions.” Entertainment Weekly gave the film a “B” rating and Owen Gleiberman wrote, “Yet for everything it gets right, Ali, following its superb first hour, begins to lose the vision, clarity, and structure necessary to bring its hero into full focus. Mann never quite comes to terms with the contradiction at the heart of Muhammad Ali – this regal narcissist who revels in his victories, his beauty, and his appetites yet who worships at the shrine of a religious sect that demands puritanical fealty.”

While Will Smith was praised for his impressive physical transformation into legendary boxer Muhammed Ali, the film itself was criticized for revealing nothing new about the man. Herein lies the problem that Mann and company faced: how do you shed new light on one of the most documented historical figures of the 20th Century? Ali eschews the traditional docudrama for a more impressionistic take on the man and life. Mann’s film may not say anything new about the famous boxer, but it does depict an exciting ten years of his life in a masterful and richly evocative fashion. It’s a surprisingly soulful take on Ali and an excellent addition to Mann’s impressive body of work.

DVD of the Week: The Wrestler

Many critics heralded The Wrestler (2008) as the resurrection of Mickey Rourke’s career but for fans of the mercurial actor, his comeback started with small, but memorable roles in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Rainmaker (1997), Buffalo 66 (1998), and The Pledge (2001). However, it was Robert Rodriguez who first brought him back to mainstream attention with roles in Once Upon a Time in Mexico (2003) and Sin City (2005). You could argue that The Wrestler finally garnered the accolades and awards that Rourke so richly deserves. This film is Rourke’s best performance in years and his most personal because it mirrors the trials and tribulations of his own life.

Randy “The Ram” Robinson (Mickey Rourke) is an over-the-hill professional wrestler who has seen better days. He’s been locked out of his trailer because he’s behind on the rent. During the week he works at a grocery store and on weekends he wrestles in small, crappy auditoriums and halls to a diminishing yet loyal fanbase that still remembers Randy’s glory days in the 1980s. He finds solace and a sympathetic ear with Cassidy (Marisa Tomei), a stripper in the twilight of her career as well. They are both lost souls who have been beaten down by life. After suffering a near-fatal heart attack, Randy’s doctor warns him against entering the ring again. However, his manager has set up a rematch with an old foe from back in the day that just might be Randy’s ticket back to the big time.

The unflinching way director Darren Aronofsky depicted drug use and its devastating effects in Requiem for a Dream (2000) is applied to the wrestling sequences in The Wrestler. One fight, in particular, is a bloody, gut-wrenching ordeal as Randy and his opponent go at each other with all kinds of objects including a staple gun – all to satiate the blood lust of the audience. Aronofsky provides fascinating insight into the world of pro wrestling, like how the wrestlers talk over what they are going to do to each other beforehand, the tactics used to draw blood while in the ring, and the use of illegal drugs to fight against the ravages of time. While anybody who knows anything knows that wrestling is choreographed and planned out, a wrestler can still get horribly injured. It is also interesting to see some of their trade secrets exposed.

After years spent wasting his talents working in direct-to-video crap or not working at all, Mickey Rourke demonstrates that all he needs is the right material to show how great he can be. Some might call Randy a loser but the actor makes us empathize with this screw-up. He is just trying to eke out a living the only way he knows how. Rourke really lets it all hang out with a brutally honest performance that exposes raw emotions, like when Randy tries to reconcile with his estranged daughter (Evan Rachel Wood). He also demonstrates a knack for light comedy as evident in a scene where Randy begins working with customers at the deli counter, or where he plays an old Nintendo wrestling game with a neighbourhood kid that features him as one of the wrestlers. In the latter scene, you can tell that the kid is just humoring Randy and would rather be playing xBox or Playstation 3.

After the critical lashing he took on the ambitious commercial failure of The Fountain (2006), Aronofsky strips away all of the stylistic excess that have been the hallmarks of his previous works for a simpler approach approximating kitchen sink realism. Instead of showing how clever he can be behind the camera, he lets the actors do their thing and this trust in them pays off in a big way with a beautifully acted character study about damaged people.

Special Features:

“Within the Ring” is a 42-minute look at the making of the film. Aronofsky talks about the challenge of working with a low budget and fighting to cast Rourke in the film. Behind-the-scenes footage shows the no frills approach and the attention to realism. Aronofsky says that the low budget freed him up and he adopted a more spontaneous approach to filming, including refusing to rely on storyboards as he had done in the past. This is an excellent featurette about how The Wrestler came together.

Also included is “The Wrestler Music Video – Written and Performed by Bruce Springsteen,” a haunting tune that the Boss did as a personal favour to Rourke and because he responded strongly to the material. This is a nice video that features Springsteen in a training gym with clips from the film itself.