While attending a Toronto festival that focused on boxers (The Cut, depressing but funny) and wrestlers (Unstoppable but uninspiring and pleasant), it’s easy to remember how engaging a combat sports movie can be when it’s well executed. Ryan Coogler’s masterful Rocky resurrection with the title Creed was not simply a good film, it resuscitated an entire genre. Although it was in a producer role this time around for the two other films that followed, the franchise itself was effective in developing a schematically new approach towards telling boxing stories.
Despite the absence of cinematographer Rachel Morrison on the sets of the Creed movies, Rachel largely drew from their working relationship, for instance, she shot Fruitvale Station and Black Panther to assist her in the creation of her directorial debut, which is an outstanding true story drama titled The Fire Inside. Notably, Rachel Morrison made waves as the first female to receive an Oscar nomination for her work in cinematography, which is regarded as a man-dominated field of work, almost making one dream to attain such success. It is not surprising then that Claressa “T-Rex” Shields’ story, a young Black girl from a broken family from Flint, Michigan, who went from winning an Olympic gold medal in boxing which no US woman ever did until her age of 17 captures her heart so much.
Her story alone is pretty amazing, but what makes The Fire Inside, previously titled Flint Strong, stand out as a great sports movie is that Morrison and the Oscar-winner scriptwriter Barry Jenkins go beyond telling the factual occurrence in her life. This isn’t just a compilation of information sourced from numerous entries on Wikipedia and then forming a narrative around history this is real history, about real people with real feelings and it is therefore, real intense.
In the film, Ryan Destiny plays Sabrina who is about to engage in a heated brawl Shields. Brought up on a scant budget at a poverty stricken area in Flint (a city that had its share of troubles long before the 2014 water crisis) with her two younger siblings and a depressed and preoccupied mother, she is a sea bomb waiting for the detonator. The release is found in her coach Jason (Brian Tyree Henry) who years ago, bucked the norm and let her join his boys only club. A fighter by nature she does not believe in giving up, and when the opportunity arises for her to qualify for the Olympic games, she and her partner are ready for action.
Here, there are several elements that elevate the conventional standards that people expect from a run-of-the-mill genre featuring the same old clichés and straightforward storytelling. One should not be surprised that the film has impressive visuals because of Morrison’s background and also due to the Euphoria and Taylor Swift collaborator Rina Yang who captures the harshness of a Michigan winter yet the excitement of an Olympic boxing match (this is an MGM-Amazon movie that looks more MGM than Amazon). Jenkins, who adapted the script from the T-Rex documentary that was aired by PBS in 2015, is also a better emotionally literate writer most entertaining about the trope- adding depth to the archetypes saying the audience has come to expect so many that the stock characters were rendered into people rather unappealing and surely quite dramatically self-contradictory.
When Shields was just a school aged child, she went up against women twice her age. Jenkins delves into Shields’ coach who was thrust into a ‘parenting’ role, handling a headstrong and sometimes ungrateful teenager. There’s also the issue with meat, as we’ve seen time and time again, it wears down a female athlete who loves the sport especially when the narrative they’re meant to fit into is so masculine. It is almost like a buzz cut is more practical than actually performing well in the sport. This should have been a red flag as Shields was starting to understand the type of business they were about to be in.
Shields has so much more at stake keeping her head up and racing up the hierarchy with the assurance that she will come down with the cash to benefit all, a beautiful sight when many around her were sitting in gloom. The inspiring and enjoyable victory in 2012 is then not the final act in the drama – rather we visit Flint again six months later to find out how propagandistic it is for her to think that she can make money out of being a female Olympian and just cut her losses. It is an incredibly dull but also realistic part of the story that enhances The Fire Inside which otherwise is just another sports day. Because it’s not enough to win when the system didn’t count on you, let alone want you to win in the beginning.
The film leaves you with a sense of motivation and frustration but it takes a toll on its two protagonists who go so high and come crashing down. Destiny a charismatic teenager with not much credits in the industry so far including Lee Daniel’s Empire spin off Star- is a true find as she manages to pull off the confusing and intense emotions of a teenager and at the same time make us believe that she can be a fierce opponent in the ring. Ice Cube was cited to play the role of coach but reportedly stepped back, the much wider actor allowing the far more versatile and sensitive Brian Tyree Henry to take over. This is once again an outstanding, crafted performance from a man who should have been nominated already for a best supporting actor award more than once, convincing as a person uncertain of how and when to provide either tough love or just support. The intimacy between the two feels explosive in its combination and disintegration.
The real life achievements of Shields and her trainer were not a walk in the park both before and after the Olympics and what really makes The Fire Inside captivating is that Morrison tries equally hard to convince the audience.
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