On the basis of the high-adrenaline films that Benny Safdie has made with his brother Josh, you might expect his new movie about the early days of mixed martial arts fighting, “The Smashing Machine,” to be an exercise in high-octane brutality, especially since it journeys back to the martial-arts beginning of its lead actor, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.
(He doesn’t use that nickname in the credits here, but it’s hard not to refer to it, considering the film’s subject matter.)
But one of the surprising things about “The Smashing Machine,” which premiered on Monday at the Venice Film Festival, is that in many ways it’s one of the gentlest movies you’ll see about fighting. This is Benny Safdie’s debut as a solo director, and he leans toward counterintuitive choices: There’s a muscular, music-driven training montage as our hero gets ready for his big bout, but the song that drives it isn’t something like “Eye of the Tiger”; instead, it’s Elvis Presley’s late-in-life rendition of the elegiac standard “My Way.”
In a way, the A24 film takes its cue from its subject, Mark Kerr, who was seemingly both a ferocious MMA fighter and a gentle, soft-spoken man. (He is now retired and shows up in the movie.) Kerr can pummel his opponents, but in the doctor’s office the next day he’ll calmly explain to an elderly woman why the fighters aren’t really mad and how much respect they have for each other.
And while you may cringe watching the damage inflicted in these bouts, where the favored way to win seems to be to throw your opponent to the ground, get on top of him and either punch or knee him in the face until the referee stops the fight, there’s no in-your-face fight cinematography where every punch is seen close-up and amplified. Instead, the matches are shot from outside the ring, and most fights end pretty quickly instead of playing out over those usual multi-round boxing-movie arcs.
In fact, Safdie might spend more time on a single shot of Kerr slowly walking back through the bowels of the arena to the dressing room after losing his first fight than he does on the bout itself.
“The Smashing Machine” is a period piece, taking us back to the time when mixed martial arts had a cult following and fighters traveled to tournaments in Japan for relatively little money, rather than getting Fourth of July showcases on the White House lawn. The film takes place between 1997 and 2000, when Kerr was a rising star along with his close friend, training partner and fellow fighter Mark Coleman.
If it’s hard to imagine a figure as iconic as Johnson playing a little-known fighter, there’s a simple solution: Make him all but unrecognizable. You can tell it’s Johnson by the voice, and the look gets a little closer late in the film when Kerr shaves his head, but for most of the film, Johnson’s own face – and, of course, his tattoos – are buried beneath makeup and prosthetics that don’t look like prosthetics, courtesy of Oscar-winning makeup designer Kazu Hiro.
He’s playing a guy who’s trying to make a mark in a field that is still struggling for respect, and one where the aim, he says, is simple: “Am I going to hurt him more than he hurts me?”
For the most part, the answer to that is yes, but Kerr gets hurt badly all the same. At the doctor’s office visit, it’s clear he’s a regular, and the way he eyes the vials of medicine and switches pharmacies and insurance companies for his latest prescription is immediately suspicious, both to the audience and to Kerr’s longtime girlfriend, Dawn (Emily Blunt). The relationship always seems a little uneasy, with vows of passion coming in between Kerr constantly nitpicking about everything from the way Dawn makes his smoothies to how she trims the cactus in the back yard.
Of course, he’s hiding an addiction to painkillers, which sends him into the hospital, then into rehab, then onto the comeback trail. These are all staples of inspirational sports movies, but Safdie isn’t really one for falling back on staples; there’s something bold in the way “The Smashing Machine” plays its fights against atmospheric ballads rather than snarling rock songs. (But there is a pretty rockin’ version of the Japanese national anthem at one point.)
In some ways, Safdie’s approach seems casual and grounded rather than pumped up, though it’s also raw both physically and emotionally. Even when Kerr is at his smiliest and friendliest, his outward calm isn’t soothing because Johnson shows just enough of the rage and pain underneath it.
Still, it’s funny that the Safdie movie about violence is calmer than the one about designer jewelry. But maybe that makes it akin to Darren Aronofsky’s “The Wrestler,” a character study where the worst brutality took place out of the ring. It’s not one of those triumphant sports movies we’re all tired of, but it’s not wrong to say that there is some triumph here.
Read all of our Venice Film Festival coverage here.
