Fat City, 1972
Ernie (Jeff Bridges) is an up-and-coming boxer. Tully (Stacy Keach) has already made a go at it once. Each man gets involved in a romance: Ernie with the sweet Kaye (Candy Clark) and Tully with the troubled Oma (Susan Tyrrell). Both of them must navigate the changeable world of boxing.
I've said before that I have a slight personal aversion to films that feature a lot of boxing. It's not something I hold against a film, but it does make it harder for me to get invested in the narrative. This film, much like The Set-Up, managed to get around that personal bias with its intense focus on the lives and hopes of the men at the center of the story.
What's most remarkable about the film is the way that it captures how hopes of the remarkable can slightly collapse into the unremarkable. The film is really masterful in how it builds moments that feel like they will be dramatic or climactic, and sometimes they are and sometimes they simply . . . diffuse. A great example of this is a conversation between Faye where she muses aloud about the chance that she is pregnant now that she and Ernie have started having sex. She basically works her way around to pitching that they get married. In most films this would be a point for a dramatic confrontation, but instead Ernie is just sort of like, "Yeah, okay." When he later speaks about his marriage (and his child), he is neither effusive nor bitter, just mildly positive.
As a huge fan of Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker, I did a total fangirl squeeeeeeeeeee! when Susan Tyrrell popped up. Her vocal tone is this really unique thing that naturally accents what is meant to be intoxication, but makes her sound as if she's perpetually experiencing a deep heartbreak. She's a perfect match for the character of Oma who, with a lot of help from alcohol, is clearly a person who lives deep, deep in her feelings.
Bridges and Keach are both very strong in their roles, but Keach really owns the film. Tully is a man who somehow seems to have totally given up and yet still has some glimmer of hope left in him. Keach absolutely nails a sort of guarded ferocity, a desire to connect and succeed having to make its way through years and years of baked on cynicism.
A really excellent example of a film driven almost entirely by character work.