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This Ain't Gonna Play in Peoria
John Voight plays Howard Cosell like an Ivy League Bobby
"The Brain" Heenan. He is the willing fool, a punching
bag for the man audiences love to see knock him out. Voight
disappears into the red wrinkles and nasal voice of the man
who used the word "truculent" to communicate to
the boxing audience. Michael Mann has a way of finding fantastic
supporting performances of famous people, coupling this with
Christopher Plummer's Oscar-deserving Mike Wallace from The
Insider. In fact, Ali brims with wonderful supporting
performances: Jamie Foxx as a smack-talking hanger-on, Jeffrey
Wright as a pensive photographer, Giancarlo Esposito as Ali's
dad. But Ali's success hinges on the performance of
Will Smith, a man who, like his subject, is completely transformed.
Smith bulks up for the role, retaining the sleek look of a
thin frame who just happens to be wearing muscle. He developed
the in-ring rhythm of Ali, who always danced through a fight,
eventually falling a lummox unable to keep up with the steps.
Smith has all the arrogance of the original, but his natural
"Parents Just Don't Understand" good-guy geekiness
is still too apparent. Watching Ali, you could always sense
the show, but the boasts contained genuine black anger as
well, enough that his personality evoked a split in his public
opinion as deep as the conflicts within him. Smith, however,
is a beat away from brilliance. If he were playing George
Foreman, he'd be a step too close to selling grilling machines
than rumbling in the jungle.
Still, if the academy refuses to acknowledge the performance,
I'm going to cry racism. In fact, they should nominate his
and Denzel's performance in Training Day, but we all
know that's not going to happen. They probably feel that they
already threw Denzel a bone with The Hurricane, but
Ali is a much better performance in an infinitely better
movie. Michael Mann chooses ten tempestuous years of the man,
beginning with his first fight with Sonny Liston and ending
with the Rumble in the Jungle. Mann's Ali is a not-an-altogether
flattering portrait; he's very childlike, an impressionable
young man whose impulses, whether he realizes it or not, rule
his every move, which he himself interprets as individual
rebellion. Ali's genius stems from his impeccable rhythm:
his danceable boxing, his singsong of his trash talk, his
way with the ladies. He has such an internal rhythm that his
body can't help but dance to the only beat he knows, whether
giving in to a lovely lady, refusing an induction, or taking
an outsized opponent the distance.
That's what I gathered from Mann's direction, anyway. He
overlays boxing matches with up-tempo jazz, which later melds
into some blues at a club, finding its way into a saxophone
for a love scene. The soundtrack is a very cool mixture of
soul, jazz, and blues that help us find the emotional center
of every scene. In this way, Michael Mann labors to create
an internal dialogue with the audience. For instance, the
opening boxing sequence tells an entire story unto itself;
Cassius Clay undergoes test, fall, rebirth, and triumph all
in ten minutes. The camera bobs and weaves so much that we
feel Liston's frustration, the internal struggle of the gladiator
brought to the screen. Michael Mann is the very best at this
sort of directorial artistry—as with The Insider,
when he took a wonkish story and created a complex portrait
of conflict and dread, like when Jeffrey Wigand's hotel wallpaper
swirls into ocean wave. He continues the trend here; Mann
specializes in blue-toned hotel rooms and pay phone conversations.
He commands his work so well that characters are left to contemplate
for minutes at a time—blinded by subway lights, jogging
through streets, etc.—and he labors to give us an impression
of their solitude.
If this doesn't sound like the type of picture you enjoy,
then Ali will probably leave you wishing for the clicker
in between bouts. The rest of us get a portrait of a man not
drawn as a hero, but as a champion whose soul is closer to
the surface than anyone else's. Right out of the bell, a punching
bag becomes a flip book exposition of young Cassius Clay's
life thus far, including his fascination with Malcolm X. The
weakest part of the picture is Mario Van Peeples, whose Malcom
X may be the most relaxed Malcolm in movie history. Still,
Mann intercuts scenes of Ali's violence with Malcolm's rhetoric,
chorused by a soundtrack of Sam Cooke, and it becomes clear
why the young Cassius Clay was so drawn to the man. Ali grows
but not necessarily matures, though I did find it refreshingly
honest to watch him cut his own deal with George Frazier in
a car on the streets of Philadelphia. "I'm gonna kick
yo' ass," Frazier tells Ali, "But are you all right?
Do you need money or something?" The film perhaps wears
on a bit too long, but we're rewarded with Mykelti Williamson
as Don King, a narcissist who dwarfs even Ali's huckstering.
In the end, though, we have to determine a purpose for the
film. Most of these biographical films attempt to deconstruct
the genius; usually it's a response to parental or societal
pressures, etc. Here, Mann wants to explain, I think, why
the world—though not at the time, for genius comes with
some vehement rejection—eventually rallied around Muhammad
Ali. Sure, we admire his mythological ability to back his
boasts, but when Mann shows us Ali running through the streets
of Zaire with half-starved children, he stops to observe chalk
drawings of himself surrounded by beautiful butterflies and
angry bees. Perhaps Ali's musical rhyming, rapping smack talk
is the graffiti of the oppressed.
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