Bloody Brilliant

Jeff Robbins / AP Photo James Toback’s documentary Tyson, opening today, offers a harrowing look at the troubled boxer and finds something surprising: He knows what he did wrong.

Boxing is a blood sport that draws a varied mix of society, from profound writers and readers to the ignorant and the illiterate. That might surprise those who are unaware of how many like to see who can throw a punch and which fighter can take one. The human inclusiveness drawn by this sport of intentionally giving pain and intentionally standing up to it was quite easily seen at the recent screening of James Toback’s superior documentary, Tyson, which opens Friday in New York and Los Angeles and meets all high level expectations.

When Mike Tyson says that everything that happened to him is his fault and that he can blame himself, we are in not only a new land for a depiction of a black athlete but one very fresh for a celebrity today.

Figures as different as one of our very finest writers, Joyce Carol Oates, showed up, as did Christopher Walken, a film actor and dancer in a long photo finish with the most original performers his profession has to offer. Especially elevating was the arrival of Smokin’ Joe Frazier, who wore a black cowboy hat, was in great spirits, and moved along in the melancholy rhythm radiating the permanent wounds he received while proving himself one of the greatest ring gladiators of the age. Also, there was the most well-known fly in the buttermilk, Michael Steele, recently elected and still controversial head of the Republican National Committee.

That very range of Americana in the flesh is an example of the epic powers of attraction had by boxing. The film itself deserves all of the audience it may receive because there is nothing quite like it.

Tyson powerfully joins the short list of films about black athletes that pursue human truth through whatever shit, grit, and mother wit must be acknowledged or explored in order to allow the human heart and the troubled—or troubling—human soul of the subject to appear before us in full complication. It is preceded by Spike Lee’s sometimes astonishing Jim Brown: All American (2002), which is quite candid, intimate, complex, and rightfully puzzling in the clarity of its achievement. There is also one of the best Ken Burns documentaries, Unforgivable Blackness (2005), about Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight champion and a man whose willingness to put himself in harm’s way has remained second to none.

Tyson is in that league. What makes it unique and unsettling is its freedom from the sentimentality that often overwhelms When We Were Kings, the 1996 documentary about the 1974 fight held in Zaire, which was then under the bloody dictatorial thumb of Mobutu. In that suspenseful fight, the entire global sporting world witnessed Muhammad Ali inarguably prove his ring genius for strategy—while literally thinking on his feet and enduring all that was necessary to bring down the apparently invincible George Foreman.

When We Were Kings is saved by the commentary of George Plimpton and Norman Mailer who bring it through its many bad cuts, its intriguing but insufficiently engaged abundance of personalities, and its maudlin perspective. The insights given by these writers take us under the mosquito nets so that we see and feel the large and small bites left from the stings of life.

Tyson is guaranteed the same thorny sense of interwoven human foibles and luminous gifts by the fighter himself, the documentary’s only narrative voice. Tyson’s tale is that of a partial innocent, a romantic, and one turned brutally naïve during his early attraction to the stunted world of criminality, where human value and vibrancy are imprisoned behind the iron mask imposed by self-serving cynicism. That naïveté remained as Tyson became a dupe overwhelmed and dazzled by the sexual access and ass-kissing that inevitably appear with the seemingly magical poof of international fame and big money. Over and over, the boxer proves himself to be uniquely insightful about what happened to him, how poorly he handled his celebrity, and how willingly he allowed his living space to be overcrowded with yes-men whose tasks were dual.