Cinderella Man (2005)

Ron Howard's Cinderella Man arrives with the sturdy, well-upholstered craftsmanship of a director who has never met a Depression-era tenement he could not light handsomely. Russell Crowe plays James J. Braddock, an Irish-American heavyweight who breaks his hand, loses everything, hauls cargo on the New Jersey docks, and then punches his way back to the title. Toronto stands in for 1930s New York with period streetcars and fake storefronts. The film wants us to feel the cold in that apartment, and it succeeds. It is an underdog story told with total sincerity, and sincerity of this vintage has its own gravitational pull.

Where social consciousness is concerned, the film keeps its ambitions modest. The Depression provides a class texture: dock workers scrambling for a day's wage, a promoter counting his take, the champion Max Baer dripping with contempt. Yet the moral engine is individual perseverance. Braddock repays his relief money out of pride, and the sportswriter Damon Runyon anoints him the Cinderella Man so that a struggling public can see itself in him. Joe Louis and John Henry Lewis appear as opponents, treated with plain respect and no commentary whatsoever. Mae Braddock resents Joe Gould profiting from her husband's danger and eventually throws a drink at Baer, which is about as far as the film's feminism travels before she returns to the radio and the children.

The remaining ledger is close to empty. No LGBTQ presence, no environmental conscience, no body-positive rejoicing in flesh, no neurodivergent interiority, no revisionist reworking of the historical record. The film sermonizes through swelling music and slow embraces, never through speeches. As a document of contemporary progressive sensibility, it registers as a faint pulse in a very large, very earnest body. Admirers of classical studio craft will find plenty to admire. Those seeking a manifesto will need to look elsewhere.