Christy

dir: David Michôd

2025

This flick died a strange death at the cinemas, critically and commercially.

I know, you don’t need to tell me, none of that dictates whether a flick is actually good or not.

I just find it funny when people scream from the rooftops when something is obvious Oscar-bait, and it’s punished as something completely worthless, and the times when they not only let it slide but praise it to the high heavens.

You can’t tell me that Hamnet was less Oscar-baity than this flick. There’s no way.

And yet…

I have no doubt someone at some point probably mentioned to Sydney Sweeney that this could do for her what Million Dollar Baby did for Hillary Swank or Monster did for Charlize Theron. Considering how young she is she might have said “Who?” but that’s neither here nor there.

Since its release just before the Oscars I haven’t been able to find a single positive review for it, although most of the reviews don’t fault the acting, they blame the Australian director David Michôd for not finding the hidden depths of these characters, or for not making it more stylish or melodramatic than it already is.

I don’t feel the same. This is a sad film about a woman who fought like a demon to escape poverty, was trapped in a horrible marriage to a horrible man, and then eventually got free because he tried but failed to murder her.

And she boxed a bunch of times in the interim.

This is not Creed. This is not Rocky. This is not a feel good sports triumphalist story about someone sacrificing everything and winning that one big fight and then living happily ever after.

Because it’s a biopic it has to conform to a bunch of facts and dates, but mostly what it adheres to is that someone from West Virginia has to sacrifice a lot to get out of West Virginia and stay out. That sacrifice is not just the time, effort and pain involved in training hard at a sport.

In Christy’s case it’s also having to go back into the closet at a time when a lot of other people in the late 90s were feeling like maybe they had the freedoms that previous generations lacked. If contemporary shenanigans teach us anything it’s that in this, the most stupid of worlds, there is never going to be an entirely ‘safe’ time to be who you are, depending on who that “who” is, when your safety and protections under the law can be taken away by a particularly nasty and vindictive administration with a conservative agenda.

When you look at Sydney Sweeney, you don’t immediately think “boxer”, but this flick pulls an amazing trick, like all good films do, convincing us that an unlikely person can do an extraordinary thing. You don’t have to tell me that it doesn’t mean the actor can do the thing they’re pretending to do on screen, because I understand how movies work, but that’s part of the flick’s charm.

Even when we watch her fight her first fight, or at least the first one we get to see, she doesn’t take it too seriously. She’s happy for the prize money, but she hasn’t latched on to boxing as her ticket out of a particularly shitty part of West Virginia, made shittier by her appalling mother (Merritt Wever), who hates everything that Christy does or doesn’t do, and can’t stand that the love of another woman makes her happy.

After another fight where she beats the crap out of some poor woman who didn’t know what was coming, at a time when women’s boxing isn’t really a thing with money and promotion behind it, someone spies potential in her talent, and suggests she turn pro.

I mean, if someone offered me a place to stay, and the option to train with a trainer, but most importantly the chance to get away from my one horse town, where the horse has choked to death on coal dust, of course I would leave and give it my best shot.

But, upon arriving at said destination, if I was shown to a beige trailer in the literal middle of a stock car race track, whatever was left of my impoverished soul would have been crushed.

Not Christy, though. She gives a very convincing performance, at least to me, of someone willing to get all the corneal lacerations, subdural hematomas and ruptured spleens possible in order to stay one rung off the bottom level of society.

Some flicks, some people really don’t get poverty. I think this flick does. At the very least the location scout picking these dismal locales knows what they’re doing. I mean, I doubt it’s hard to find shitty impoverished locations in North Dakota or Florida, but they tell a big part of the story.

Christy is fighting for purses that aren’t big paydays. They’re barely paydays at all, because in this era no one is selling the screening rights for the fights to cable television, or sports channels, or for pay-per-view. These days it’s commonplace, but then? She was blazing a trail in a sport not entirely ‘stood up’ yet.

What makes it even harder is that part of her rise at least initially depended on her being trained by a guy willing to train a ‘girl’, being Jim Martin (Ben Foster, never more terrifying or repugnant), who doesn’t like her at all. And yet this middle aged man, paunchy and with a gloriously Trumpesque combover, still decides he needs to attach himself to Christy so that he never really needs to work again for the rest of his life.

To say that the relationship between trainer and boxer is odd is an understatement, because if it was fiction you wouldn’t buy it, knowing that Christy is gay. But this is real life, this is what happened, so hold onto all your prejudices and biases as you accept (or don’t) that they did get married, that he did help train her, that she had a bunch of successful fights, and that he was an appalling, abusive piece of shit to her up until the grim end of their relationship.

See, when I see reviews talk about “by the numbers” and “rote storytelling”, I can’t actually think of that many flicks that have this trajectory as their trajectory. Rags, to riches, to hubris, to redemption / comeback, yes, that’s a familiar path. But poverty, to minor success, to medium success, to persistent, overwhelming, isolating abuse and then awful butchery / attempted murder; that’s not as common. There isn’t a specific big show or specific fight that this flick builds to (the fight that seems like that is portrayed as the terrible idea that it was, with Muhammed Ali’s daughter, and one of her most significant defeats), the real main event is whether she’s going to survive at the hands of her appalling husband, and whether she will find true love in her life, not what prize belts she wins momentarily.

As a boxer, even before she’s picked up by the legendary Don King (Chad Coleman), Christy exhibits that shit-talking braggadocio we now consider de rigueur for competitors in the martial arts. What adds a particular additional flavour to her abuse of her competitors at press conferences is that she has no compunctions about calling her opponents “dykes” in a pejorative manner or implying that she’s going to brutalise them so badly in the ring that their girlfriends are going to lament the loss of their looks.

I mean, we know she’s gay but… She knows what she’s doing is wrong, but it’s only almost too late when she realises it.

She trash talks her next opponent, being Lisa Holewyne (the great Katy O’Brian) with gaybashing drivel, and she looks at her like “are you kidding, sis?” They fight, and Christy knocks her down, but you can see in her clear gaze that she sees through Christy’s fighting persona to the woman underneath, in a way no other person in the film bothers to.

Christy does have friends, people who care about her, but the relentless predations of her controlling piece of shit husband still leave her isolated and unable to turn to anyone, really, for help extracting herself from this impossible situation. She makes a mistake we in the audience, if we were so inclined, would be talking to the screen begging her not to confide in her mother, and her mother is even worse than we could have imagined when push literally comes to shove. For reasons known only to Christy’s mother, she chooses at all times to believe Jim’s lies and to infantilise Christy as a mentally ill dullard who could barely function in this or any other life unless some man somewhere approved of what she did.

She has a dad (Ethan Embry), but he can no more protect Christy from her mother than he can from her husband. After she is hospitalised, and the piece of shit is arrested, he does offer up the token “good thing the cops got him, because I would have killed him!” empty macho bullshit that dads are expected to say, but at the very least the film does take the time to show all the insidious things done over time that an abuser does in order to keep their victim/survivor isolated and vulnerable, even and especially from the family members that actually love them.

Ben Foster. Ben fucking Foster. Look, I know he’s a great actor, who can play awful men, and gentle men, and everything in between (but especially psychopaths), but the character is so loathsome, so brutish, so fucking gross, that it almost seems impossible that any of this could be real, or based on an actual person whose surname is not Trump.

He existed, though, but thankfully no more (having died a few years ago). Foster makes sure we can smell him through the screen, dread his appearances, choke when we hear his oily voice.

When I say I enjoyed watching this film, I did not nor will I ever be able to watch scenes of domestic abuse, up to and beyond what’s depicted here, and call that enjoyable. The latter scenes when Jim tries to make good on his threats of many years are absolutely horrific. Nothing in the ring is as horrifying as those scenes.

But in those final scenes, like in the earlier ones, Christy shows that, all of the time, she is tougher than the people around her, especially her shitty abuser. People talk about resilience, but few people 30 kilos lighter than Laila Ali could have lasted as long as she did against an opponent she should never have been in the ring with, and even being stabbed, flayed and shot couldn’t stop her from trying to save herself either.

And after all that, she still wants to fight, because fighting is all that she knows and all that makes sense in her life.

I actually think Sweeney’s performance is a really strong one, in that she mostly underplays the character, deliberately, to the characterisation’s benefit. Emotionally we get enough to know that there’s an inarticulate and emotionally closed off woman inside the fighter waiting to come out in many senses of the words, but there’s time enough, for that (before the film ends). She is called the Coalminer’s Daughter, but she’s no Loretta Lynn, and despite being discounted and dismissed by a lot of men (and even and especially by her hateful mother), even those that would exploit her, she persisted with an endurance, an ability to transmute her pain into victory, and triumphed, in her own way.

And even if it’s petty, my gods, did I love her highly offensive ‘victim impact statement’ she gets to read out in court at Jim’s trial. That was the cherry on top, for me, and potential highlight of the film.

There’s no gold medal for that, or trophy or shiny belt. Or Academy awards, apparently. But there is the satisfaction of nevertheless persisting.

8 times Christy is less about victory than it is about living long enough to piss on your enemy’s grave out of 10

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“Good luck.”
- “Good luck not getting the fuck knocked out.” – that’s a bit harsh - Christy

https://www.imdb.com/video/vi2870462489/