To say my interest for “The Smashing Machine” was piqued, proved and poked at for months is a bitch of an understatement. A24 was throwing a few of its slickest production dollars after a biopic based on Mark Kerr, the bruised and barely walking cautionary tale of pre-mainstream MMA, casting none other than Dwayne “The Dwayne” Dwanyeson as the leading role…..and he appears to be actually trying this time?
I mean, it satisfied my curiosity….but to what end?
Benny Safdie’s first solo outing without his brother Josh blankets this normally cliched template from a purely observational yet detached lens that often becomes frustrating; it’s less an anti-biopic and more of a hagiography that Safdie keeps treating like a liminal space. His direction shoots for modesty and sincerity only to sacrifice perceptiveness for the sake of….vibes, I guess?
When it comes to the staging and utilization of the set construction, James Chinlund’s internalizes minimalism for intimacy with his production design, dutifully recreating a distant world that quickly becomes plain window dressing. I appreciate the persistent vacancy and the attempt to writhe itself into something intimate but instead, we get sterility flattening everything into what might as well feel like airless continuums. Perhaps this is the point: to make that denial of comfort or inhabitability linger longer in a time period that helps underline the loneliness of the subject but otherwise, picks apart the immersion.
For such a verité approach, this presentation treats this docudrama through a pseudo-guerrilla aesthetic that almost scratches and claws for clarity to the way a second skin clings to open wounds; it’s almost suffocating how restless it is, trying to contort itself to feel as close to a documentary as possible. Maceo Bishop’s format variety of VHS, 16mm and 35mm among others, does help his cinematography capture the nascent world through our central duo, sticking to monolithic, flattened enclosure or handheld camera jerking, jittering and lurching that makes every frame seem to gasp for oxygen. Coincidentally, its Benny Safide’s own editing that gives the disconnected repetition of shots some leeway.
Accommodating for the free-flowing structure is a pacing that’s somehow both gentle and predatory with its rhythm, costume design that at least matches the late 90’s, early 2000’s visual aesthetic, barely any tension or suspense to be wrestled out of the drama and while I won’t say there’s a consistent pulse to the rather hushed tone of the film, it’s surgical enough to transplant the few traces of empathy out of the more causal audiences and dissect whatever numbness is beneath the surface.
I’m surprised I didn’t suffer whiplash from Nala Sinephro’s weird jazzy experimental scoring; this aural collage does better in supplying the weirdly ethereal atmosphere more than the set design does. The needle drops and sound design are overbearingly flashy (which I guess makes sense as the film’s more focused on the sensory experience of Mark’s world), many of the match exhibitions breeze by quickly to potentially illustrate the highs and coming down periods akin to spiraling or recovering drug addiction and for a film branded with the R-rating, it’s a very tame one.
Finding a good performance from the acting isn’t difficult but more often than not, the actors have to work around the material they were given, making their two dimensional characters interesting IN SPITE of what they were given. The two main characters in particular are a perfect example of this; they’re the biggest ciphers in this movie despite having nearly all the attention spent squarely with them, yet our leads work overtime to make the emotional labor visible with varied success. Nothing against the supporting cast but Emily Blunt and Dwayne Johnson successfully break themselves emotionally and physically across the hard corners to rein in these measured performances of people actively working through pain.
Not to mention, it’s the most melancholic and vulnerable I’ve seen from The Rock in years.
As for the narrative itself, there isn’t really a clever way for me to spin this: it’s one of the most basic and straightforward stories about a celebrity’s rise, fall and rise again that I’ve ever seen, only this time we’re deciphering that person’s precarious life story while stuck in the early, more controversial days of a sport that has since then blown up around the world. Undercooked, jagged and leaning towards obvious simplicity rather than taking the opening to go deeper, I can’t say its a terrible viewing experience but you will wish more was done instead of just mimicking another style in lieu of establishing one of its own. Plainly by-the-numbers, it’s rife with surface level explorations on fascinating subjects that just torpedo and go absolutely nowhere while the realism it wants to burrow out just digs its own grave.
It deliberately sets up this dichotomy in blurring the lines between documentary and traditional narrative feature while masquerading as this brutal raw story that wants to trade charisma for grit and vulnerability….but only to a fault. Because it outright refuses to elaborate anything on the who’s, where’s, why’s and how’s regarding Mark Kerr’s character or his life, which means you’re up shit creek without a paddle if you haven’t already seen the 2002 documentary on him; look, I get trying to bring a forgotten chapter to the public eye while also not putting the man on a pedestal simultaneously but when you bookend a story within this context alongside a script so sparring and affectless that it barely explores anyone’s psychology, it makes you question what the point of making this movie was because it’s not really about anything beyond reminding you that this person exists.
The entire structure and thus, the very idea behind this story’s inception has such a nebulous form that offers so little to grab onto and hold tight. It’s stiff karaoke that almost borders on plagiarism.
Even when it subverts, the film’s actual content can’t resist lionizing its subject. But what else can it really talk about when the cliché story beats about opioid addiction, balancing a violent career with a socially acceptable home life, and the persistent struggle to make ends meet keep being hammered over your skull to the point of flanderization? Mark Kerr’s struggle for inner peace over chasing external glory barely gets its foot off the ground to feel prevalent and the few times there is a gradual opportunity to comment on the UFC’s bloodsport history that would eventually find itself entwined with the manosphere within a few short decades, it brushes those kernels aside and just carries on its merry way. You know, for a film trying really hard to be manic-depressive, it's actually quite surprising how it sometimes paradoxically drags with the weight of a tranquilized sloth.
But am I the only one who feels like the real problem here is that it’s trying a bit too hard? Like, in eschewing all of the traditional biopic beats for so long, that two-faced surfacing over the usual machinations eventually turns triple-glazed? It’s the peculiar way that it grapples with its subject matter that does give it some sentience but leaves the ambivalence out to dry and wear off quickly.
Bobbing and weaving between dull inertia, arching momentum constantly experimenting for the next high, and a fantastic Dwanye Johnson lead performance, the most profound strengths of “The Smashing Machine” begin and end at Benny Safdie’s ambition to not walk the well-trodden path. But in its attempt to straddle a gritty character study, glossy Hollywood biopic, and stiff docudrama, the end result feels over-reverential and, for lack of a better term, hollow.
