Big George Foreman
Cinema that documents the lives of star athletes or artists typically has a general outline: rise to success, fall from grace (usually due to addiction and ego), redemption. A great biopic see “Get on Up” or “I, Tonya” will wring some deep truth about its subject out of this structure, a so-so one will just use it to hit the expected beats. Then there’s a movie like “Big George Foreman. The Miraculous Story of the Once and Future Heavyweight Champion of the World.” That’s not really a title it’s a parable. And rightly so, because “Big George Foreman” is about a life that feels so absurdly tailor-made for the vicissitudes and teachings and uplifts of the superstar biopic genre that you can’t improve upon it. In effect, George Foreman has already written it himself.
Directed by George Tillman Jr., who made the heartbreakingly good “The Hate U Give” as well as the unfairly overlooked Biggie Smalls biopic “Notorious,” with Brad Caleb Kane (“Black Sails,” “Fringe”) sharing script duties with him, this boxing picture turns into a faith based movie that then becomes both. Is it an accurate biography? Yes at least mostly. Is it a psychologically dense portrayal of George Foreman? It is workmanlike and traditional and slightly stolid in its characterization but honest to the facts and true to his spirit as both sinner and saint, and what they combine to produce is without precedent in sports history.
This is about an absolutely devastating left hooker even by comparison with history’s most fearsome punchers. Where did he get that wallop? This film asks that question directly, and its answer is fury.“Big George Foreman” understands that boxing at its best operates on another plane entirely from mere brawling in the street but does not flinch from revealing the motor that drove a fighter like Foreman. In scenes of him as a teenager (played by Austin David Jones) in Houston, we witness the poverty he grew up with (his family cuts a burger into four pieces, and he’s the only kid who can’t afford to bring lunch at all), and the way other kids trample on him for his threadbare surroundings rouses a primal anger in him that sends him pummeling anyone who dared to mock.
To express the fact that boxing and rage are linked is an understatement. “Raging Bull,” the best boxing movie ever made, earned this title for a reason. Still, not all great boxers are raging bulls. While Foreman is one of these characters, Khris Davis’ portrayal of him, with his icy glare of wrathful determination makes it clear that even as a directionless young man who joins the paramilitary Job Corps in the mid-’60s, George much like Malcolm X sees himself as nothing more than an angry Black person reacting to injustice done against them. These things tend to pile up. So when George spots in Pleasanton, Ca.’s Job Corps barracks the trainee who stole his mother’s Converse sneakers off a truck, he wants to beat him into unconsciousness. And we get it: It’s one slap in the face too many.
George comes close to getting kicked out of the Corps entirely until he’s saved by Doc Broadus (Forest Whitaker, charmingly grizzled and speaking through gravel), an officer running a training camp for boxers on base. Not only does George take up punching but also every other discipline related to it the jump rope, repetition etc. as if it were second nature. It’s 1967 and Doc tells him he should try for the American Olympic boxing team in five years’ time, George looks at him with his wild scowl like he wants to beat him up just for saying so. A year later according to the film, he’s in Mexico City for the 1968 Olympics having trained for only one.
This was also famously when Black American track stars Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their black-gloved fists from atop the medal podium during their ceremony; but when George beats Soviet boxer Iones Chepulis by TKO for gold they hand him a little American flag which he waves around the ring. All anybody talks about when he gets back to the States is how he sold out, embracing America instead of taking a more radical posture. Talk about provocation! But George doesn’t let it get him down. He takes that rage into the ring and climbs up the mountain through heavyweight after heavyweight until his title shot finally comes, against Joe Frazier (Carlos Takam).
One might say that the rest is history. Foreman beat Frazier. Matthew Glave plays Howard Cosell, who goes apoplectic and shouts “Frazier is down! Frazier is down! Frazier is down!” (I do wish the movie had included an even less remembered Cosell line: “It’s target practice for George Foreman!”) The fact of the matter is that the fights in “Big George Foreman,” from that title bout to his Rumble in the Jungle against Muhammad Ali in Zaire in 1974 to his loss to Jimmy Young in 1977, are so iconic that the movie can’t pretend to invest them with cataclysmic suspense. Sullivan Jones, who plays Ali, tries hard, but you feel how hard he’s trying because he’s miscast. He doesn’t have Ali’s moonstruck Dionysian quality, he’s more like Ali as a lawyer.
For a while there, George Foreman owned this world (until Ali took it back), but you could also say that the real drama of “Big George Foreman” starts after all that. George besides being an angry fighter is a sinner with women. He meets sexy-supportive Paula (Shein Mompremier), marries her and then takes her for granted while he fools around behind her back. And he pays for it. His domestic life collapses; his boxing life fades, Jimmy Young gives him a near-death experience. All movie long, George’s mother Nancy (Sonja Sohn), a conservative Christian lady who has never liked boxing one bit, keeps telling him to honor a higher power. Now death looks him in the face, and finally George does it: He bounces back and embraces Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior Almighty. He gets himself baptized at last.
Talk ain’t been Big George’s strong suit up till now, but talk will come upon him the gift of gab, his transformation into the smiling, big-daddy George Foreman we know now. It’s a shift in his spirit. The letting go of the rage.
This is not a boxing movie. This is a conversion narrative, an addict’s redemption story. And watching it, I must confess to detecting a certain amount of that slightly bland I’ve seen the light piety that tends to make me less than ecstatic about most faith-based movies. (It’s not that I don’t like faith, I just don’t like seeing faith turned into Hallmark propaganda.) But “Big George Foreman” does have one last act up its sleeve, courtesy of history, and it turns out to be a doozy. Knocked down by life after he’d already been knocked down by life, George gets knocked down even further this time by his finances. He’d entrusted them to Des (John Magaro), his flaky alcoholic bunkmate from the Job Corps in California back when he was still Cassius Clay Jr., and as a result of this trust Young Des went ahead and lost every penny which means that after having set up shop as preacher at Houston’s Youth Center while married to born again Mary Joan (Jasmine Matthews) during what should have been comfortable retirement years for someone with 10 kids and five wives behind him already, George winds up flat broke.
There is only one thing left for him to do and no, I’m not talking about the George Foreman Grill (although that does deserve a mention). George is going back into the ring. When he’s 38. After he’s been out of boxing for 10 years. Now looking (as the movie quips) less like Superman than the Michelin Man. (He’s 315 pounds and needs to get down to 265.) He’s long past the point when any boxer who is sane has ever gotten back into the ring. But he will do something insane. He will win. And win and win.
Because he’s got the old rage? No. Because he’s tapping into the boxing force that sprang from the rage and is connecting it to a higher impulse: the desire to save (himself). He may be still a raging bull, but now he’s a transcendent bull. And all of this, of course, really happened. George Foreman became, at 45, in one of the most incredible stories in sports history, the oldest man ever to win the heavyweight championship. “Big George Foreman” takes you far enough inside that journey, that coup, to become a sports biopic of stirring immediacy. The film has a conventional heart, but it’s about a victory we share as our own.
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