Click here to listen to the flashback interview with Sean Durkin for MARTHA MARCY MAY MARLENE.
It would be too easy to pigeonhole THE IRON CLAW as a gloss on toxic masculinity in our culture. To be sure, that element is mightily present in Sean Durkin’s poetic tale of fathers and sons. Based on the true story of the Von Erich family, who made their name, and their legend, in the world of 1980s professional wrestling, it is more than the clan’s father, Fritz (Holt McCallany), telling his sons that men don’t cry while benevolently bullying them into mental illness and clinical depression. There is something much more subtle at work here as the familial bonds that are hard-wired into children become a stranglehold on them that they are incapable of throwing off, or even recognizing. It’s a father’s grudge against a world that he believes has taken away his own chances at becoming a wrestling champion that becomes the basis for that family’s curse.
At the center of the story is Kevin (Zac Efron), a sweet and shy young man who is a terror in the ring, a star on the circuit, and unable to conduct a conversation with the pretty girl (Lily James) who wants his autograph. When the girl, Pam, asks him out, the muscle-bound fighting machine is gob smacked and smitten. Fortunately, his father approves of her, as does his mother (Maura Tierny), and his three surviving brothers, all of whom live at the family ranch in Denton, TX. There they train together to achieve their father’s dreams of wrestling redemption, and jockey for the position of second-favorite son behind Kerry (Jeremy Allen White), the one heading for the 1980 Olympics in Moscow. When the US pulls out of the competition, it’s chalked up to the curse, which Kevin explains to Pam with a little more seriousness than makes her comfortable. Not that she believes in curses, but she does believe that being convinced about having one is not healthy.
She’s right, and over the course of this heart wrenching film, the implications of Fritz’s convictions about that and everything else play out with a relentless inevitability, building to a tragedy of epically Greek proportions. It is a slow-motion train wreck with all the attendant horror that is in high contrast to the rambunctious tenderness of brother’s love for each other, the passivity of their acquiescence to a father who sees them only as a means to an end, that becomes almost too much to bear, particularly when youngest son, the slight and sensitive Michael (Stanley Simons), is pulled into the family business instead of being allowed to follow his own dreams of being a musician.
For Efron, this is a game-changer. Sporting an unfortunate Dutch-boy haircut, bulked up into sinew and muscle, he is the heart of the film as we watch Kevin grow from an extension of his father without an identity of his own and then face having no frame of reference for that existence. Instead he reaches out to an emotionally unavailable mother, and leaves behind wife and baby to spend the night curled in the fetal position under the desk in his father’s office. This is a performance of deceptive simplicity and great power as Kevin evolves from someone who not just has no life outside the family home, and under his father’s thumb, but also someone who cannot conceive of any other type of life existing. At the start he is almost an automaton with limited affect, waiting for cues from his father to tell him how he should feel, by the end, he is a wounded soul learning to process his feelings and not always succeeding.
The power of the writing is the finely observed character study, with a superb, and superbly directed, cast. McCallany as Fritz is the perfect blend of obsession and charm, doling out emotional abuse in the guise of fatherly concern. He and Durkin are smart enough to avoid making him an overt monster of the type that would have driven away wife and sons long before the action recounted here. At his core, he cares deeply for his sons, but not, and here is the tragedy, more than for his own thwarted dreams.
The background of professional wrestling, the veneer of competition over a carefully choreographed performance, is fascinating with its behind-the-scenes expose and a neat piece of explanation by Kevin to Pam about the many shades involved in the concept of “fake”. This is an insider’s view that has a genuine love for the sport, or “sport”, depending on how you look at it. If you look closely enough, it’s easy to spot the flim-flammery, but not if you want to get carried away by the hype. From a doughy world champion past the first bloom (Kevin Anton) of youth drubbing Kevin, to the be-sequined excrescence of materialism and ballyhoo (Aaron Dean Eisenberg) talking smack for the camera and small talk behind the scenes, the artifice is in plain sight.
THE IRON CLAW becomes the signature wrestling move that Fritz passes down to his sons, and the hold he has on them. It’s also the need to use any means necessary to get even with a world that he is convinced has cheated him. Haunting, devastating, and suffused with the melancholy of missed chances for happiness, Durkin’s cautionary tale is a powerful meditation on family and identity.
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