The Iron Claw
The Iron Claw” is a lot like the professional wrestling world it depicts it’s bursting with energy and passion, it wants to entertain and thrill you, but ultimately it feels empty and superficial.
This is too bad because the true story of the Von Erichs which is what this movie tells is filled with drama and tragedy. It’s practically Kennedy esque how much grief this family has known. Writer director Sean Durkin has assembled an incredible cast to play them, among them Zac Efron, Jeremy Allen White, Harris Dickinson and Holt McCallany. But then he gives them nothing more to do than exist in one-note roles, they don’t change as people even after all they’ve been through over what seems like a relatively short period from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s.
Kevin Von Erich (Efron) is always the good hearted leader who just wants to hang out with his brothers. Kerry Von Erich (White) is self-destructive and struggles with substance abuse. David Von Erich (Dickinson) is the natural showman who feels guilty about leapfrogging Kevin as the face of the family. Mike Von Erich (Stanley Simons), the youngest, doesn’t want to wrestle at all, he’d rather make music, but fights to fit in like his brothers and competes for his father’s approval. Fritz Von Erich (McCallany) is a fearsome figure as larger-than-life patriarch Fritz Von Erich, himself a former professional wrestler who now pits his kids against each other and pushes them past their limits in his quest for vicarious glory, but even that remains at one note despite one unimaginable heartache after another.
In fact there was another brother even younger than Mike Chris, whom the film leaves out entirely. Durkin has said this was an agonizing choice but made sense dramatically, I guess so, but “The Iron Claw” is all about how strong this brotherly bond is supposed to be and how unhealthy the whole family system was. Chris is never mentioned, although some of his characteristics emerge in Mike. Weird.
And I say that as a big fan of Durkin’s two previous features his unnerving 2011 debut, “Martha Marcy May Marlene,” which put Elizabeth Olsen on the map; and the woefully underseen “The Nest,” a two hander with powerhouse performances from Carrie Coon and Jude Law. Cinematographer Mátyás Erdély, who also shot “The Nest,” creates a steamy, cloistered tension here too that suggests anything or anyone could explode at any moment, but for all its performative brutality, “The Iron Claw” remains curiously understated.
It’s just so sad or at least it should be so sad. But we rarely feel an authentic human connection between these brothers. And while Lily James brings a nice sparkle as Pam, the flirtatious fan who becomes Kevin’s wife and the mother of his children, their conversations all have a similar rhythm and purpose.
However, there are a lot of styles here, starting in the 1960s with a grainy black and white flashback to Fritz’s heyday. “The Iron Claw” revels frequently and it can be fun in bad hair and worse clothes, wallowing in what is now very cheesy period specificity. The montage in which the Von Erichs find the song that will become their anthem (Rush’s iconic “Tom Sawyer”) has a kind of muscularity reminiscent of Scorsese, it moves. (And yes, they play all of “Tom Sawyer.”)
What’s on display physically, though and the amount of work that must have gone into achieving it is undeniably impressive. Efron was already fit, he has made himself so large that he is nearly unrecognizable in places. We do have to get over the fact that Kerry Von Erich was 6 foot 2 and Jeremy Allen White is not, but White brings a quiet, brooding intensity that makes you wish his dedication were being put to use on a more complicated role.
Everyone seems game for the emotional challenges of the material, no one more so than Efron, who has never been better. As the family’s matriarch, Maura Tierney creates a shaken sense of loss that feels like an amputation.
But too often character development is sidelined for historical ground coverage; too often human complexity gets treated as something to be tidied away afterward. And then magical realism comes bobbing up toward the end like an unloved relation nobody remembered to tell us about. (This is also where we notice Chris Von Erich wasn’t around.) Fans who’ve waited decades may love revisiting this era’s excesses; casual viewers might hit “tap out.”
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